THE MOUSEWIFE
Chamber opera for children, a musical story of emotional growth for young audiences
Meet the Composer Louisville “New Residency”
On April 24, 1996, at the Bomhard Theater of the Kentucky Center for the Arts, the Louisville Residency of Meet The Composer premiered The Mousewife, a forty-five minute chamber opera, or musical story, by Composer in Residence Steve Rouse, with the composer conducting. Approximately four hundred third, fourth, and fifth grade students from Martin Luther King Elementary School attended the premiere and participated in singing the climactic song, Forever Free, which they learned in music classes prior to the event. The Mousewife was designed with Kindergarten through fifth-grade children in mind, but big people may enjoy it, too. The Mousewife can be used as a multimedia learning experience to help focus, in a comfortable, entertaining way, on such issues as personal freedom, self-esteem, self-sacrifice, friendship, separation, and prejudice.
The Mousewife is based on the book of the same name by Rumer Godden. The adaptation and original song texts are by Steve Rouse and Joy Stephens. The Mousewife is the story of a little mouse who is different from all the other mice...she has dreams. When a wild Dove is brought to the house where she lives and is put in a cage, the little Mousewife overcomes her fear of his strangeness and differentness to become good friends with him. The Dove teaches the Mousewife all about freedom and the outside world, and she, in turn, summons her courage to free him from his cage, but not before she struggles with the issue of what his leaving will mean to her. These issues and many others are explored in The Mousewife.
