Sammy & Remmy

I always loved going to circuses throughout my childhood. Not only because I love animals but because some of my fondest childhood memories involve trips to the circus. This opera is a brief, concentrated story about circus elephants being captured in the wild and then released in the end. It encapsulates the emotions of the animals (elephants and a lion) behind the scenes. This story includes an animal trainer, Joanna. She is similar to a jailkeeper as her role is to keep the animals in order and train them for shows. She sympathizes with the animals, but her morals eventually clash with her work as a circus trainer when the lion passes out from exhaustion. This results in her freeing all the animals in the end. Throughout the piece, there are evident reoccurring themes for individual characters that follow their inner emotional struggles. Besides their prominent themes, overall shapes depict each character - the elephants have rising melodies, while the hunters have falling melodies. Meanwhile, the lion has static melodies (often repetition on the same notes), and Joanna's melody is somewhere between. The story does not mention exactly where the animals are released. They could be sent back to the wild, but they could also be somewhere in a civilized city amidst even more chaos than they had initially encountered in the circus. However, it is an open-ended question that goes beyond circus animal cruelty and asks us how animals are being treated in our time.