Musical America: Awakenings “As Well-Crafted Musically As It Is Compassionate”
Before Awakenings was a new opera by Tobias Picker, premiering at Opera Theater of St. Louis last week, it was a ballet, with a score also by Picker (completely different from the opera), as well as a 1990 film starring Robert DeNiro, and the basis of a 1982 play by Harold Pinter, A Kind of Alaska. Each owes its origins to British neurologist and prolific author Oliver Sacks’s non-fiction book of the same name (1973), a series of case studies about his experience with patients at Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx suffering from the aftermath of sleeping sickness (encephalitis lethargica), a pandemic that lasted from 1916-1927. Many of its victims died, others lapsed into a bizarre syndrome that left them frozen for decades—often mid-transition from one movement to the next—like statues.