Let's talk FEARLESS with the Composer, Director, and Conductor!
/
Welcome to Fearless!
Fearless is inspired by the adventures of Hazel Ying Lee, her family, and the Women Airforce Service Pilots.
In this musical drama, our heroes, faced with challenge after challenge, find themselves going back (in many different ways) in order to move forward.
To reflect their journeys, the music and words of Fearless also go back in order to move forward.
You’ll hear musical themes—simple, tuneful melodies, sung or played when characters say or do certain things.
When our heroes go back, we too will go back—to these musical themes and the words that go with them. (A list of some of the songs can be found below.*)
Then, as our heroes move forward, these once-simple tunes can (I hope) take on a greater meaning for us all.
Fearless is dedicated to my family—past, present, and future.
My thanks to OperaDelaware for bringing Fearless to the stage. Thank you, too, for being a part of this world premiere: I’m excited to share this story with you, and I hope you enjoy the show.
SONG LIST
About My Sister
This Is Our Flag
Golden Mountain
Up in the Air
Is This Your Country?
Village Song
Fly
Fearless
Survive
On This Day
Thanks to You
Unsung Women
Is This Our Country?
Brothers
Carry On
When I became an American citizen, the judge presiding over the naturalization ceremony stood before a vast hall filled with new citizens from every corner of the world. Her words were brief but powerful—words that have stayed with me ever since. She said: “Now you have the responsibility to build and shape the America you dream of.”
This opera is more than a historical narrative. It is an intimate exploration of family, identity, belonging, and resilience in the face of displacement and conflict. It asks how we carry forward the past, how we shape our future, and how we choose to define ourselves in times of great upheaval.
At its center is the story of the Lee family, Chinese-Americans who, like many immigrant families, navigated both the promise and the burden of the American dream. The characters and events in Fearless are based on real people and lived experiences. Hazel Ying Lee, one of the first Chinese-American women to fly for the U.S. military, and along with her brother Victor Lee, a soldier of the U.S. army during WWII, were part of a large family. The character of Iris, a fictionalized sibling, serves as a narrative thread—a bridge between history and memory. As narrator, witness, and participant, Iris offers the audience a deeply human lens through which to view the family’s journey. Through her eyes, we experience the personal stakes behind the history that shaped their lives.
In creating the visual world of Fearless, I collaborated with Guadalupe Marín Burgin to use archival footage not as background, but as a poetic and interpretive force.
These video art pieces act as living textures—reworked, layered, and reframed to blur the boundaries between past and present, fact and feeling. By destabilizing the historical image, we invite viewers into a space where memory, emotion, and history coexist.
This creative process has been one of profound emotional and artistic engagement. As someone who understands what it means to straddle different cultures, histories, and definitions of home, I feel a deep kinship with the themes of this opera. The Lee family’s story is uniquely theirs, but it also speaks to a broader human experience—the struggle to belong, to be seen, and to leave a meaningful legacy in a world that is often indifferent to those on the margins.
To be part of the creation of Fearless is an immense honor and a privilege. It is a reminder that art can bear witness, create space for forgotten voices, and challenge us to imagine a future shaped not only by struggle, but also by courage, empathy, and transformation.
Working on a new piece is an interesting kind of project.
Maybe it is because the creation of new works is often only tangentially connected to the central training of a classical musician–the careful conversation of the compositions of the deceased, or at least conveniently distant–that it can be a slightly disorienting experience. There’s plenty to share concerning new work, but there’s one aspect in particular that I’ve been thinking about recently and want to share with you. The score.
While this may not be broadly understood outside conservatory halls, the concept of the score as a center authority is deeply engrained in our training. Even in opera, which is to say theater (perish the thought), this reverence for the written text is fundamental. There are many musicians (some of them my teachers) for whom the centrality of the text and fidelity to it are a defining feature of their practice.
We have an entire vocabulary to discuss the score as an object. We purchase multiple editions to signal our artistic seriousness to our colleagues. Terms like come scritto (as written) and Werktreue (faithfulness to the work) highlight our intention to align with the will of the composer in our every thought. An entire segment of the classical music industry is dedicated to creating the most perfect, flawless Urtext (earliest version of the text) editions that reflect composers’ intentions unsullied by decades or centuries of ill-informed performance practice.
We have a score for Fearless, but it is not a score cast in the mold described above.
The scores of Verdi and Mozart carry the weight of history. Their heft is emblematic of the countless hours of thought and pages of writing dedicated to their interpretation, to attempting to penetrate their meaning by successive generations.
While the score to Fearless is not a light object (you are welcome to come take a look at it during the intermission or after the performance), its mass is not a helpful metaphor for its significance. It approaches the purely conceptual and, even in its substantial physical reality, possesses a lightness, unburdened by years of analysis and commentary, that I believe you will experience tonight, not only through the character of Hazel, whose optimism shapes much of the piece but through the creativity of the entire team of people who have worked hard to bring these performances to fruition this weekend.
Over the past few days, it has been interesting to consider that the performances we give this weekend could become the primary source material for some future performers of the work. As our work on the piece progressed, passages were cut. We adjusted the tempi and text, made changes, and then unmade those same changes the following day. All of these adjustments are specific to this production, this cast, this orchestra, this theatre, to this particular circumstance.
It is a cliché that every performance is unique, but maybe this weekend, it is worth considering that idea again. This weekend, you are helping to transform the idea of Fearless into reality for the first time. We in the production have been working towards this for a few months; Derrick and the staff at Opera Delaware much longer. Now, we need you for this final step into the world. Let’s take it together.
I hope you enjoy Fearless.
