The Death of a Composer: Rosa – A Horse Drama is a 1993-94 opera

Opera

Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance...

 by Louis Andriessen

Louis Andriessen

Louis Andriessen is a Dutch composer and pianist based in Amsterdam. He teaches composition at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague...

 on a libretto by Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway, CBE is a British film director. His films are noted for the distinct influence of Renaissance and Baroque painting, and Flemish painting in particular...

, the sixth libretto in Greenaway's Death of a Composer

Death of a Composer

The Death of a Composer is a series of ten opera libretti by Peter Greenaway dealing with the deaths of ten 20th Century composers from Anton Webern to John Lennon. All ten composers left behind ten common clues related to their deaths. Greenaway was interested in this commonality and explored...

series that explores the deaths of ten 20th century composers from Anton Webern

Anton Webern

Anton Webern was an Austrian composer and conductor. He was a member of the Second Viennese School. As a student and significant follower of Arnold Schoenberg, he became one of the best-known exponents of the twelve-tone technique; in addition, his innovations regarding schematic organization of...

 to John Lennon

John Lennon

John Winston Lennon, MBE was an English musician and singer-songwriter who rose to worldwide fame as one of the founding members of The Beatles, one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed acts in the history of popular music...

.

Background

This opera tells the story of Juan Manuel de Rosa, a fictitious Argentine

Argentina

Argentina , officially the Argentine Republic , is the second largest country in South America by land area, after Brazil. It is constituted as a federation of 23 provinces and an autonomous city, Buenos Aires...

 composer

Composer

A composer is a person who creates music, either by musical notation or oral tradition, for interpretation and performance, or through direct manipulation of sonic material through electronic media...

 who intended to emigrate to the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 to write film scores for Westerns, but was instead murder

Murder

Murder is the unlawful killing, with malice aforethought, of another human being, and generally this state of mind distinguishes murder from other forms of unlawful homicide...

ed in Uruguay

Uruguay

Uruguay ,officially the Oriental Republic of Uruguay,sometimes the Eastern Republic of Uruguay; ) is a country in the southeastern part of South America. It is home to some 3.5 million people, of whom 1.8 million live in the capital Montevideo and its metropolitan area...

. The most memorable aspect of the story is that Rosa falls in love with his horse. The opera is scored for 2 sopranos, tenor, 2 baritones, female speaker, 8 mixed voices, and orchestra. Greenaway made a film version in 1999, though it was not shown in the United States until a 2005 premiere at the Walter Reade Theater in New York City

New York City

New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

.