Tesla's Opera

Tesla’s Opera: The Real, Stranger-Than-Fiction Nikola Tesla brings the visionary inventor Nikola Tesla to life through the opera he inspired, Violet Fire. For its creators, only opera could encompass the extremes and surreal qualities of Tesla’s life and career: the visions he had from childhood, his inventions that helped create our wired and wireless world, even his unrealized ideas. Tesla moved in the heights of New York society, yet he never married, and gave his love to a white pigeon.

With a score by minimalist composer Jon Gibson, libretto by Mir Seidel, and directed by Terry O’Reilly, Violet Fire had its world premiere in Serbia, Tesla’s homeland, on the 150th anniversary of his birth. Tesla’s Opera includes the full libretto, stunning photos from the performance, and haunting images from the continuous video projections, along with commentary by the opera’s librettist, director, and conductor, critic Merilyn Jackson, and author/poet Andrei Codrescu.

This book offers us the Tesla we need now—stranger than fiction, worthy of remembrance, and packed with meaning for our time.