Karim Al-Zand: Music: A Joint Interest

A Joint Interest

chamber opera for 3 voices and ensemble

A Joint Interest is a short chamber opera for three voices and ensemble based on a 1904 short story by O. Henry entitled Makes the Whole World Kin. It forms a companion piece to another chamber opera, The Leader, with which it shares its instrumentation and voice casting. The opera was commissioned as part of the Shepherd School of Music’s 50th anniversary celebrations in 2025, and was premiered by student singers and instrumentalists.

SYNOPSIS

It is late evening. A woman putters about her apartment. She is suffering from insomnia on account of her persistent rheumatoid arthritis. After she finally falls asleep, a cat burglar enters her apartment intent on robbing her. She wakes up and in the ensuing imbroglio, we discover that the thief is a fellow sufferer of joint pain and the two bond over shared medicinal experiences. A Joint Interest retains O. Henry’s charming comedic style, his sharp characterization and his famous surprise endings.

CAST
Woman (mezzo-soprano)
An arthritis sufferer and insomniac

Burglar (lyric baritone)
A cat burglar of the professional class

Officer (baritone/bass-baritone)
A night-shift police man

PROGRAM NOTE
Times being as they are, much of my recent music has been rather serious in topic and tone. But on this happy occasion, to mark the 50th anniversary of the Shepherd School of Music, I chose to engage a story filled with charity, warmth and good humor, those qualities having always marked my time at Rice. A Joint Interest is a short comic scene, in the tradition of opera buffa and operetta, genres not often represented in contemporary repertoire.

My libretto is loosely based on a short story by American author O. Henry (1862-1910) entitled Makes the Whole World Kin.I first encountered O. Henry’s short stories in middle school, and I remember immediately being taken by their charm, humor and most of all, by the author’s famous “surprise endings.” Though A Joint Interest is a broad farce, I hope you’ll find that its madcap humor is stitched together with a thread of seriousness worth remembering, a truth that binds us all together—a “joint interest,” if you will. For, as George Bernard Shaw said, “When you want to tell people the truth, you’d better make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.”