Mallarme and Paradox Opera: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

The Durham-based Mallarmé Music, a 40-year-old chamber music ensemble will work with the 3-year-old Paradox Opera based in Morrisville to present the newly composed opera The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. The opera score is by composer Robert Chumbley with the libretto written by Carey Scott Wilkerson. 

Several years ago, the estate of the great writer Carson McCullers and the McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians awarded composer Robert Chumbley the operatic rights to her masterpiece novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Mr. Chumbley was attracted to the work because it requires two main characters to be mute, amid the setting of the most sonically large art form, opera. The themes of the novel (the deaf community, the Jim Crow era, the angst of teenage years and LGBTQIA+ community) are still so relevant, if not more so, some 65 years after McCullers wrote it. The librettist is the gifted Carey Scott Wilkerson, a renowned poet and a nationally known McCullers scholar.