Composer Kate Soper releases The Hunt, a one act chamber opera inspired by a series of medieval tapestries known as "The Lady and the Unicorn." The work is scored for three sopranos who also play instruments onstage (violin and ukulele), and incorporates some of Soper's characteristic compositional interests, such as the use of diegetic music, into this intimate staging.

During a visit to Paris in 2016, composer Kate Soper saw an exhibit featuring the series of medieval tapestries known as “The Lady and the Unicorn.” In their pictorial storytelling, the tapestries recount a legend that says that the way to catch a unicorn is to lure it with a virgin maiden: once it is lulled by her purity, the unicorn becomes vulnerable to capture by nearby hunters. Finding resonance between this antiquated story and society’s contemporary controversies surrounding control over and exploitation of women’s bodies, Soper was compelled to write a short story about the experience of being unicorn bait. During pandemic quarantine, passing the time with a ukulele and 10th century riddles, she turned that story into a series of video diaries, and then motets, and later, a staged chamber opera for the intimate forces of three sopranos self-accompanying on ukulele and violin.

The result is The Hunt, an opera for three performers that manages to glide through myriad stylistic territory, convey a multi-dimensional narrative, and offer a stark critique of historical and contemporary ideas of sexuality and gender all in one act. The stripped-down instrumentation evokes troubadour culture: three singing musicians, traveling with portable instruments, bringing their tale to attentive listeners. Soper goes beyond the era-appropriate musical allusion however, mining the unique instrumentation for echoes of ironic music theatre (in the “Livestream” update movements), indie folk (track 5 “On the Unicorn”, track 11 “Maiden Song”), homophonic three-part chorales (track 3 “King’s Comment”), parlor song (track 4 “Riddle #1” and track 10 “Riddle #2”), and avant-garde vocal textures that dip into the absurd (track 21 “Sugar Song”). The structure of the piece rotates through these livestream updates, riddles, songs, comments, and solos, forming a kind of cyclical ritual to the way the story unfolds.

The opening “Prologue: de Monoceron,” with Latin and English text taken from medieval bestiaries, is an annunciation for the three high voices a cappella, playing with counterpoint that snakes in and out of consonant sonorities and unstable intervals. The virgins admonish that “The unicorn can’t be taken alive!” Unless… it is soothed by a virgin maiden. “Livestream #1: Day Seventeen” introduces the temporal slide between the medieval and contemporary worlds, and begins to lay out the plot of the opera. A texture featuring violin glissandi and ukulele strums accompanies an informational mini-aria in a format that Soper returns to several times throughout the piece, as the days and weeks accumulate and the tension grows.

The three “King’s Comments” are scored for the three voices with supporting electronic drone accompaniment. The drone undergoes a kind of ominous disintegration in each, but particularly in the extended “King’s Comment #3”, as the text describes a potentially fatal surgery to restore virginal purity if “any blot of sin” is found to be keeping the virgins from completing their job.

The "songs" feature the ukulele as the anchor instrument, strumming and arpeggiating rhythmic figures that frame the folk style in which they are written. In “On the Unicorn,” a strange text by medieval poet and composer Hildegard of Bingen is set to an angular meter and cheerfully dissonant harmony, producing delightfully irregular phrases. In contrast, “Maiden-Song,” with text by Christina Rossetti, is a steady dirge, as a regular strumming pattern in the ukulele and harmonics in the violin provide the foundation for responsive singing between the three voices.

The three "solos" each present one of the characters' inner thoughts, as represented by the works of symbolist poet H.D. Here, the other two singers provide repetitive, haunting background textures as each virgin in turn expresses feelings of frustration, whether tinged with impatience, longing, or rage.

The instrumental writing is not without its corners and turns. In “The Noble Unicorn”, violinist Hirona Amamiya tears off sul ponticello virtuosic lines over moto perpetuo arpeggios in Christiana Cole’s ukulele. Cole’s accompaniment in “Troubadour Song” traffics in intricately shifting duple and triple groupings, while Amamiya comments on the vocal line with poignant melodic phrases. Amamiya has an extended, seductive solo violin introduction to “Not Honey,” before the ukulele establishes a simple modal figure.

“Sugar Song” and “Third Sighting” break through the formalism and propriety of the repeating movements, and lead the listener into a surreal, internal world. “Sugar Song” features a panoply of wordless extended vocal techniques that spill over into laughter; the virgins, at their emotional limit after months of increasing threat and degradation, have thrown caution to the wind and embarked on a hallucinogen-driven out of body experience. “Third Sighting” opens with a sonic vision, as the unicorn finally appears – a halo of voices saturated with reverb and processing gives way to a cinematic audio image of a hunting party, with gunshots, dogs, and horses, and finally closes with a layered texture of modular, repetitive sung and spoken texts as the virgins process this incredible event separately and together. After this cognitive break in the progression of the piece, Soper brings us back to song with the sensual “Not Honey,” in which the virgins enact their plan to protect the unicorn by secretly losing their virginities, and a final “livestream” and “riddle”. Finally, the piece returns to the text and annunciatory quality of the Prologue in the “Coda: de Monoceron." This time, there is no caveat attached to the key phrase. “The unicorn can’t be taken alive” -- and by extension, neither can the no-longer-virgins. The text from the prologue has been transformed into a battle cry: although we do not know what will happen to the characters after the opera ends, they have found collective strength in the determination to claim their autonomy, and to keep a magical creature from senseless destruction.

– Dan Lippel & Kate Soper