COMPOSER Born: Brooklyn, NY, 28 Dec. 1896 Died: Princeton, NJ, 16 March 1985

(U.S. Opera Home Page)

• Lancelot and Elaine. Libretto after Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Composed c. 1910. Unpublished.
• The Fall of the House of Usher. Libretto by T.S. Eliot after the short story by Edgar Allan Poe. Composed c. 1925. Incomplete.
• The Trial of Lucullus. Opera in one act. Libretto after the translation by H.R. Hays of the play by Bertolt Brecht. Berkeley, CA, 18 April 1947.
• Montezuma. Opera in three acts. Libretto by G.A. Borgese. Berlin, 19 April 1964.
• The Emperor's New Clothes. Libretto by A. Porter. Incomplete.

Although many musicians and composers consider Roger Sessions to be one of this country's most important composers, his brilliant but sometimes difficult music is not well known by the operagoing public. His opera Montezuma, considered by some his finest work, deserves the increased attention it's received in recent years.

Roger Sessions. When Lilacs Lasst in the Dooryard Bloom'd. Quivar, Boston Symphony/Ozawa 1992. Compact disc: New World 80296.

Frederik Prausnitz. Roger Sessions: How a Difficult Composer Got That Way. Oxford University Press 2002.

Andrea Olmstead, ed. The Correspondence of Roger Sessions. Northeastern University Press 1997 (hardcover).

Roger Sessions on Music: Collected Essays. Paperback: Princeton University Press 1979. Hardcover: Princeton University Press 1979.

• The Roger Sessions Society