Trouble in Tahiti

Trouble in Tahiti is a one-act opera in seven scenes composed by Leonard Bernstein with an English libretto by the composer. The opera received its first performance on 12 June 1952 at Bernstein's Festival of the Creative Arts on the campus of Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts to an audience of nearly 3,000 people. The work is about 40 minutes long. The NBC Opera Theatre subsequently presented the opera on television in November 1952; a production which marked mezzo-soprano Beverly Wolff's professional debut in the role of Dinah. Wolff later reprised the role in the New York City Opera's first staging of the work in 1958. Bernstein's later opera, A Quiet Place (1983), incorporates Trouble in Tahiti in the form of an extended flashback, and both versions are regularly performed worldwide.
Musically, Bernstein indulges in many of the styles he is most recognized for. The heroine's first aria has a wistful melancholy reminiscent of Aaron Copland's earlier vernacular works and of Bernstein's later writing in West Side Story, while the jazzy interludes harken back to the score Bernstein wrote for On the Town.