By Janelle Gelfand
Enquirer staff writer
A miracle occurred during Sandra Bernhard's summer in Lucca, Italy, home of the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music's summer opera program.
Bernhard, head of CCM's opera department, staged Puccini's Suor Angelica (Sister Angelica) in the garden of a real convent: San Micheletto in Lucca.
According to the Catholic church, a miracle occurred within Lucca's convent in a nun's cell, now a memorial chapel.
"For the students, that was a phenomenal coincidence, because that's what happens at the end of the opera," says Bernhard, 45. In the opera, Sister Angelica commits suicide after learning that her illegitimate son has died. The Virgin Mary appears and saves her soul, allowing her to be with her son.
"I've been doing a lot of multi-media within my (opera) projects at CCM, so I wanted the (staged) miracle to involve multi-media," Bernhard says.
She borrowed a digital camera, three data projectors and three DVD players from the university for the project and collaborated with designer/film editor Thaddeus Strassberger and assistant film editor Adam Miller, who wrote, edited and shot a film of the "miracle." It was projected on an outside wall of the garden, giving the illusion that it was part of an existing colonnade.
Filmed in black and white (patterned after Italian filmmaker Vittorio de Sica's 1949 movie, The Bicycle Thief), the segment showed the child bathed in light, descending a staircase, as his mother is dying in the garden.
"The next image we see is her carrying her son upstairs, as if to bed," Bernhard says. "It was perhaps the most incredible miracle I've ever done."
She adds, "This summer was all about collaborations." Opera fans might see a similar collaboration in The Voyage of Edgar Allan Poe, an ethereal opera by Dominick Argento that Bernhard will stage in May.
"It is that moment before you die, when your life flashes in front of your eyes. This whole piece is a two-hour, slow motion of that moment," she says.
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E-mail jgelfand@enquirer.com
