A Short Bernstein Opera on a Troubled Marriage

By Anthony Tommasini [NY Times, 10 October 2005]
KATONAH, N.Y., Oct. 9 – Leonard Bernstein was on his honeymoon in 1951 when he began composing his one-act opera “Trouble in Tahiti,” a curious time, you would think, for a young man to write a wry, jazzy and jaundiced portrait of a troubled suburban marriage. In introducing a production of “Trouble in Tahiti,” presented in the Music Room of the House Museum at Caramoor on Saturday night, Michael Barrett, the chief executive and general director of this center for music and the arts, said that the work could be seen as a bittersweet look at the troubled marriage of Bernstein’s parents.