Elly Uncomposed: A Novel Opera

Elizabeth Kirtenpepper loves the opera.She loves the beauty, the stories, the passion, and most especially, she loves to play the piano in her cramped, corner studio and watch the performers from the shadows of the orchestra pit.

But when a magical book transports Elizabeth into The Marriage of Figaro, she must take employment in an entirely different type of pit: the scullery of the ruthless and domineering Count Almaviva.

Stuffed into a corset and forced to wear impractical shoes, Elizabeth meets Figaro, Susanna, and the whole cast of memorable characters. But no one is sticking to their story, and a strange, hooded villain is running through the estate, unraveling every bar line and fermata of Mozart’s score! Elizabeth soon realizes that if she wants to return to her 21st-century of indoor plumbing and hair conditioner, everyone else must first return to their original plot.

But to confront this operatic villain (obviously a baritone), Elizabeth will have to summon her own inner diva and vanquish calamities from leprosy and sexual politics to revolutions in Spain. In fact, the little pianist from Kansas may just end up changing her own story as well, when she discovers that everything she ever really needed to know … well, she learned it at the opera.