BRIAN MCCORKLE

An excerpt of Act 1 was performed at PS21 in Chatham, NY on July 26th, 2025 as part of CATCH, the rest of the opera is currently in development.

Saint Rita of Cascia was an Italian Augustinian Nun who lived from 1381-1456 in Central Italy. She was famously kind, gentle, patient and stubborn throughout her life, and embodied these qualities in the face of an abusive husband (murdered by his enemies in 1401), the death of her two children by dysentery, and while she was living at the convent. She received partial stigmata in 1442 and was declared incorruptible by the Catholic Church hundreds of years afterward. She was only canonized in 1900, after centuries of veneration by the people of Central Italy. She is the patron saint of impossible causes, abuse victims, bees, and the unofficial saint of baseball. My obsession with Rita began in Arizona, while visiting the family of my partner Nina Isabelle, where we kept driving past the most beautiful mountains I’d ever seen, just over the Mexican border, and eventually looked up their name: the Santa Ritas. This lead to an investigation as to who this Rita was, and I was so moved as to write a 6 Act Opera in collaboration with her spirit/memory. The opera’s orchestration grows steadily over the course of the 6 acts, from solo violin, to string quartet, adding horns, woodwinds, a choir, electronics, and percussion. Some initial studies for the electronic parts could be heard in an installation format at the back of the field behind PS21, installed in an apple tree in a nod to the bees living in a small fissure in the wall of the convent near to Rita’s cell.