The Death of the Chicken (2022) Perusal Score

Music theatre work for Tenor, Countertenor and Piano

Duration 15’

Libretto by Peter Cant, after Brothers Grimm

Music by Ed Hughes

Programme Note

This fifteen-minute opera weaves a cast of 12 animal characters using just two singers, piano and electronics through a dream-like journey of lamentation, storytelling and disaster. A Cockerel grieves for a dead hen, his love. Animals help to transport the hen on her final journey, on a makeshift cart. The procession encounters a stream that seems like a precipice, with disastrous consequences. The story is absurd and tragic; small-scale and epic; dream-like; repetitive. A future production could realise this work using puppets or animation to render the cast of animals and objects visually.

Work in progress - workshop performance at Attenborough Centre for Creative Arts:

Words - Peter Cant Music - Ed Hughes

Countertenor - Matthew Farrell

Tenor - Andrew Mackenzie-Wicks

Pianist - Richard Casey

Director - Peter Cant

Video & puppetry - Ergo Phizmiz & Lottie Bowater

Sound & technical - Adam Staff

Thanks to SHL & ACCA, University of Sussex

Please contact me for further information.

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