Cerise Jacobs

Biography

Blessed with "an imagination that rather literally knows no bounds," creator and librettist Cerise Jacobs "might be seen as having singlehandedly brought on a radically new operatic dispensation, to wit: librettist-driven opera" (La Scena Musicale). An opera developer of vision and irrepressible enthusiasm, she stands at the very center of each development process, initiating the concept, writing the text, and choosing the composer according to her libretto's stylistic demands. Through her production company, White Snake Projects, she produces original opera that combines high production values with a social conscience, investing in those American composers most adept at communicating myth-based stories of the collective imagination. Dedicated to making art accessible, White Snake Projects commits one third of its seats to underserved communities of all kinds. Jacobs's first opera, Madame White Snake – co-commissioned by Opera Boston and the Beijing Music Festival and composed by Zhou Long, who is celebrated for his synthesis of Chinese and Western idioms – won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for music. Praised by Opera News for its "real lyricism" and "simple and clean" language, her libretto with its "elegant English text" was cited as a major factor in its outstanding success. Madame White Snake is one of the operas that make up Jacobs's trilogy Ouroboros; the others are Gilgamesh and Naga, composed respectively by Paola Prestini, the interdisciplinary impresario behind National Sawdust, and Scott Wheeler, co-founder of the Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble. Altogether Jacobs has seven new operas produced or scheduled for production, all of them based – as is her practice – on her own original stories. Her subjects range from video games to a new closing chapter for the Book of Revelation, and her composers include Julian Wachner, Director of Music and the Arts at Trinity Wall Street, and Dan Visconti, the creator of Opera Philadelphia's recent Warhol-inspired ANDY: A Popera.