August, 2025 - Mir Seidel
My new book, Tesla’s Opera, tells the story of the visionary inventor Nikola Tesla, through the opera about him that I worked on as librettist. The opera Violet Fire, with a score by composer Jon Gibson, was performed in New York, Philadelphia, and in Belgrade as part of the celebration of Tesla’s 150th birthday. The book comes out in September from Fomite Press.
When I first read about the visionary inventor Nikola Tesla, I thought that only an opera could encompass the extremes and surreal qualities of his life and career: the visions he had from childhood, his inventions that helped create our wired and wireless world, even his unrealized ideas. Emigrating from Serbia to the US in the 1880s, he achieved fame with his discovery of how to generate alternating current, and lived a glittering life in New York. He never married, and lived in poverty in his later years, devoting himself to feeding pigeons in the city’s parks.
Writing the libretto for that opera, I realized I needed to put Tesla’s relationship with a certain pigeon at the heart of the story. He confessed to loving this pigeon, and to seeing an unearthly, powerfully bright light just before she died. In the opera, the White Dove sings to Tesla, offering a sense of Tesla’s communion with the mysteries of electromagnetism, in words and music.
As a longtime reader of the Seth books, I wanted to convey the feeling of a person of extraordinary gifts who somehow acted as a channel for technologies to manifest and transform our world—someone who rode the crest of the wave of mass events, that process where we agree together on what will be and what will not be, at least not yet.
Some twenty years later, I was invited to put together a book about the opera, as a kind of counterweight to the recent, unfortunate associations of Tesla’s name with the electric car company. It’s been a hugely meaningful experience for me to revisit the opera, and to invite others to offer commentary on it and on Tesla. The contributors include novelist-poet Andrei Codrescu, critic Merilyn Jackson, and the opera’s director, Terry O’Reilly and conductor Ana Zorana Brajović. The book also includes the full libretto, excerpts from Jon Gibson’s score, and dozens of photographs from the performance and its video projections.
I’m delighted to share this book with Carolyn's wonderful community. You can order it from your favorite bookstore, or online from bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble or Amazon.