Project: Orchestration of a three act opera, The Little Mermaid, text by Marguerite Yourcenar, translation by Dori Katz.  Based upon the well-known fairy tale of Hans Christian Andersen, Marguerite Yourcenar wrote her play, La Petite Sirène, in 1942. She saw the play as representing a turning point in her thought. It reflected her changing concern from a "meditation on mankind to a meditation on nature," or from archaeological preoccupations to geological. It is of course all of this, in a manner of speaking, but it is also an extraordinary and magical story about love, identity (mistaken and real), and deception. The opera is traditional in the sense that it is in three acts, and will call for a large symphony orchestra.  Beyond that, there is much that is quite unusual, or distinctly non-traditional. For one thing the leading protagonist, the Little Mermaid, sings only in the first act. At the conclusion of the act she loses her voice, promised bounty to the Sea Witch for the gift of legs with which to seek out the handsome Prince. In the second and third acts, she becomes a dancer, or ballerina, depending upon the production.  Thus the role will have to be shared by two individuals, a singer in the first act, and a dancer/ballerina in the following two.  Another unusual feature is the presence of female voices alone in the first act. Conversely the second act is entirely made up of male or male-impersonating voices (there is a page, a young boy, sung by a soprano), a total of five characters, of which two, the dwarfs Gog and Megog, are distinctly grotesque. Only in the third act is there a mixture of male and female voices. But here again, there is an unusual emphasis, since a choral quality will predominate with a chorus of bird-angels (female voices and a boy soprano) joining the nine mermaids from the first act. Time and space play a structural role in the opera. The first act takes place in the depths of the ocean, the second on land by the seashore. The third, although beginning on the Prince's boat, nonetheless reaches to the skies, or to a third level, as the Mermaid jumps into the sea but is carried by the bird-angels to heaven. The opera begins and ends with a timeless, reflective quality, whereas most of the action, principally in the second act and at the beginning of the third, is visibly sequential and momentary.