There is a moment near the end of Longing – A Love Across The Ages when the Forgotten Prince, newly awakened after thousands of years entombed, pleads with the gods of every name—Ra, Odin, Zeus—not to save himself, but to save the woman he has come to love. “Close your eyes and take my hand,” he says to her, with nothing but darkness and memory ahead. The line is not grand. It is quiet, soft, almost unsung. And that is the defining strength of this one-act opera: its refusal to overstate the very thing it understands best—longing itself.
Composed by Craig Brandwein with a libretto by David Alan Sellers, Longing tells a surreal but strangely grounded story. Set in a New York museum in the late 1920s, it centers on Elise and her father, Dr. Curtis, who are preparing to reveal a new Egyptian exhibit—a major academic triumph for them both. But the real discovery is not historical. It is emotional. One of the sarcophagi contains a prince who was buried alive, cursed to remain conscious across centuries. And he has been watching Elise. He knows her voice. He’s learned her language. And he has, impossibly, fallen in love.
It’s a premise that could easily buckle under its own weight. But Sellers’ libretto is less interested in myth than in interior life. Elise is not an ingénue, but a woman raised among artifacts, fluent in loss, and wary of illusions. The prince, for his part, is not a melodramatic figure; he is gentle, cautious, humanized by love and wounded by time. Their connection, as it builds over the course of five tightly written scenes, becomes a meditation on what it means to love something—or someone—you can’t fully understand.
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Brandwein’s music meets this challenge with admirable restraint. Rather than leaning into operatic bombast, his score flows with lyrical transparency. Themes recur like remembered thoughts. Instrumentation is modest—woodwinds, piano, strings, percussion—but purposeful. The opera’s first and longest scene establishes tone and character with patience. Later scenes move more quickly, as the emotional stakes rise, but the musical language remains grounded, accessible, sincere. The entire work unfolds in under 50 minutes, and yet it lingers.
Vocally, the cast inhabits the work with clarity and subtlety. Laura Melton gives Elise an understated strength, while Austin Green brings a bruised tenderness to the role of the prince. Ashley Black, as the Queen’s ghost, speaks from beyond not as a specter of doom, but as a guide. And Christopher Farley, as Dr. Curtis, is quietly devastating in his grief. His final lines—an anguished whisper to his daughter’s spirit—are perhaps the most operatic thing in the entire work, not because they soar, but because they don’t.
What Longing – A Love Across The Ages ultimately offers is not spectacle, but intimacy. It is a love story, yes, but also a story about history: how we carry it, excavate it, and sometimes, despite our best efforts, become part of it. The opera closes not with triumph or resolution, but with remembrance. As Dr. Curtis walks out of the museum and the lights dim, we’re left with a single truth: some stories echo not because they are loud, but because they are true.
Chadwick Easton