The idea for an opera began with a text message two years ago.
Alex Stillwell, a high school senior studying creative writing at Interlochen Arts Academy, fired off a message to Jimmy Teti, also a senior, studying music composition.
“I texted Jimmy in October of 2024, ‘I have an idea’, and he was like ‘what is it?’” Stillwell said, “and I was like ‘We should write an opera.’”
Two years later — not a crazy amount of time in the world of writing operas — they’ve combined Stillwell’s libretto and Teti’s score into a 25-minute work that takes the stage Friday at Interlochen Center for the Arts.
An immigration story
“Enea” is set at Ellis Island in 1906, and begins with a telegram from Washington, D.C., telling immigration inspectors there to crack down and be on the lookout for “un-American characters.”
This comes as an Italian family — father, son, grandparents — arrive in America and find entering the country is complicated by the recent orders from Washington.
It’s inspired by the Aeneid, an epic poem written by Virgil more than 2,000 years ago, which tells the story of the founding of Rome.
Composer Jimmy Teti said after he and Stillwell decided to write an opera, they were looking for an idea. And one arrived while he was sitting in a master class at Interlochen, with composer Reena Esmail.
“She was talking about how important her Indian American heritage was to her work,” Teti told IPR. “I got to thinking ‘Well, I have Italian American heritage,’ and my grandmother was an opera singer and Alex and I were already thinking about writing an opera, and for me, I was like ‘This is a story that is shared by so many people.’”
So he pulled out a legal pad, right there in class, and started writing the outline of what has now become an opera in two scenes, about 25 minutes long.
“In the 25 years I’ve been here, this is the only student-completely-created opera that I have seen,” said Cynthia Van Maanen, who teaches musical composition at IAA. “Music at the end of the day is a craft like any other craft, and if you learn it, and you know your tools and you devote a certain amount of time each day to doing that craft, then it gets easier and easier. I don’t want to make it sound like anybody can do it. There has to be that artistic spark. But it is not a mystery.”
Nor is opera really that intimidating, says Laura Osgood-Brown, director of Opera Theater at Interlochen, jokes that opera is just “musical theater with more vibrato,” and that while they take the work seriously, the operas themselves can be fun and free-wheeling at times.
The genre should have a wide definition, she said — not just things composed long ago, but new works and new stories.
Getting ready
Two years after that just-an-idea text message from Alex Stillwell to Jimmy Teti, the pair and the students have assembled a cast of five, an orchestra of nine, and are getting ready to perform it on Friday night.
They hope audiences will interpret what they’ve written as having just as much relevance in 2026 as it does in the 1906 world of its characters.
“My roommate is an international student from Costa Rica and it has gotten harder for him to come to school here every year that we’ve been roommates,” Teti said. “This is very real for us.”
He says they intentionally created “historical anachronisms” in the plot, getting some small details about 1906 purposefully wrong in order to point the audience “to the fact that this is on Ellis Island, but it’s not only about Ellis Island.”
And setting the story in the past can provide an easier way into the issue than the fraught and furious immigration debates of today, Stillwell told IPR.
“A lot of times people, are overwhelmed with the news and with stories and satire that it becomes challenging for people to approach things about the present in a sort of honest and unprejudiced, unassuming way,” he said. “When you approach problems through, not abstraction, but through the distance of time, people connect a whole lot better, and you find that most people really agree on central issues.”
Producer: Austin Rowlader
Editor: Steve Junker
Host: Ed Ronco
Music: Blue Dot Sessions
