There are stories that insist on being rediscovered. They lie dormant—not lost, merely waiting—until the right voice stirs them back to life. Longing – A Love Across The Ages, a one-act opera by composer Craig Brandwein and librettist David Alan Sellers, is such a story. Set in a museum among the hushed relics of antiquity, it unfolds like the opening of a forgotten scroll: quietly at first, then with emotional force that feels at once ancient and eerily immediate.
Brandwein, whose career spans five decades of music education, audio production, and composition for television and film, brings a rare kind of artistic maturity to the opera form. This is not the work of someone trying to prove virtuosity. Rather, it is the work of someone who has lived long in sound—who has listened carefully, taught generously, and now, at the intersection of craft and memory, has something essential to say.
The opera’s premise is mythic, yet human. Elise and her father, Dr. Curtis, are preparing an Egyptian exhibit in 1920s New York. Among their findings: a cursed prince, entombed alive for thousands of years, who has remained fully conscious. He has listened to Elise from within his sarcophagus, learned her language, and—against all reason—fallen in love. What follows is not a fantasy, but a reckoning. The prince reveals himself. Love is declared. The cost, as ever, is death.
What elevates Longing beyond its narrative conceit is how sincerely it treats its emotional terrain. Sellers’ libretto, elegant and unforced, sidesteps melodrama for clarity. His lines are direct but lyrical: “I was rediscovered by you,” says the prince, summing up not just their improbable romance, but the very heart of the opera—what it means to be seen after centuries of silence.
Brandwein’s score honors that same principle of emotional transparency. Scored for chamber orchestra and performed with intimate precision, the music breathes. It does not push or pull. It listens. Motifs return like thoughts resurfacing in grief. Harmonies lean tonal but never predictable. There is a grace to Brandwein’s restraint—perhaps the result of a life spent teaching others how to shape sound, rather than commanding it outright.
The structure is tight: five scenes across just under 50 minutes. Scene 1 establishes tone with patience and grace. Scenes 2 and 3 allow love to unfold not through rhapsody, but through recognition. Scene 4 delivers its heartbreak with devastating quietude. Scene 5, the opera’s coda, offers not closure, but continuity. As the prince joins Elise in death, there is no triumph—only tenderness. “Close your eyes and take my hand,” he says, not as a hero, but as a man finally allowed to touch what he has long only observed.
What makes Longing – A Love Across The Ages extraordinary is not its ambition, but its intimacy. In a time when opera often strains for relevance through reinvention, Brandwein and Sellers have instead uncovered something older—and, paradoxically, more enduring. The opera does not ask us to believe in curses or ghosts. It asks us to believe in the ache of being known, the cruelty of time, and the beauty of a hand extended across it.
Like the artifacts it imagines, Longing feels timeless because it speaks to something beneath the surface: the longing to be remembered, and the quiet hope that love, once unearthed, might survive us all.
Mindy McCall
