Dreaming of Wonderland.

In the final paragraph of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures , Alice awakens from an afternoon nap and regails her older sister Lorina with the story of her now famous dream of Wonderland. Lorina muses upon the magic years of childhood but then, following Alice's example, dozes, and in her own brief dreaming, recalls the characters of her sister's imagination. Lorina awakens feeling gratitude for having been able to share Alice's naive and magical world; the book ends. In creating an opera based on the two sisters and their relationship, similarly to the way Lorina reflects upon Alice's experience, I consider Lorina's experience. How is her dream different from her sister's? What, about Alice's Adventures, holds Lorina's attention, and why? Musically, the work borrows extensively from tonal idioms. An obvious detail which forms an essential latticework throughout the musical structure is the contrast between Alice's bright D major and Lorina's more complex B major. The tonic triads of the two keys share the pitch F-sharp as a common tone, and among other things, this pitch defines the tonality of the two sisters' reconciliation in the opera's coda. Thus tonal, consonant music scored for string orchestra accompanies the real world scenes in which Lorina and Alice interact. Once Lorina awakens to her dream of Wonderland in Act Two, however, tonal constraints are released and music of greater dissonance, color and unpredictability, scored for the complete orchestra, accompanies her journey. The follies of the Knave of Hearts form a significant subplot---so important in fact, that when we consider that the Knave opens and closes the narrative, mediates between the real world, Wonderland, and the audience, and shares in the opera's climax just as does Lorina, we ponder where the focus of the opera actually is: Wonderland, the real world, or some place else. Finally, although the curtain falls, the cycle of inspiration and imitation continues. Each member of the audience holds the potential---sleeping or waking---to return to the Wonderland of their own imagination.PhDDoctor of Musical Arts (DMA)Communication and the ArtsMusicTheaterUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/132950/2/3253203.pd