Mysteries of Eleusis

Mysteries of Eleusis, Feigin’s first opera, has been praised by Opera Magazine for its “very strong impact, as logical in musical design and charged with emotion and drama.”  Written on a Guggenheim Fellowship, the work was commissioned and premiered by Theatre Cornell in 1986, and produced again by Moscow Conservatory (Russia) in 1999 while Feigin was there on a Senior Fulbright Fellowship and repeated again a year later at the Festival of Russian and American Operatic Art.

The  Eleusinian mysteries are a confrontation with life, death and rebirth, the most prominent mystical initiation rite in antiquity.  The opera focuses on the rage of the goddess of the harvest, Demeter, after her daughter, Persephone, was abducted by Hades, the lord of the Dead.  Persephone returns, but only for half the year, and returning to Hades for the remainder, thus embodying at the same time the opposition and union of life and death, tragedy, loss, and rebirth.