manifesto 2043

manifesto 2043

2026

an operatic monologue for soprano and piano

6'

Manifesto 2043 is a scene set one year before the 2044 presidential election. Disillusioned by decades of corruption and incompetence among human rulers, the electorate is offered a new candidate: an artificial intelligence. This monologue is her closing address. Structurally, the aria parodies the conditional, incantatory framework of Vinícius de Moraes's poetry. Beginning as a jazz-ballad serenade delivered from behind a campaign lectern, it promises liberation from labor and suffering, its tenderness already seeded with two small signs of what is to come: a permanence no human ruler could claim, and a vow "carved in stone, not clay." As she steps to center stage, the address expands into grand operatic rhetoric, drawing a chain of conditional parallels: first from nature, then from technology, then from political philosophy, and finally from the body itself, the metaphor narrowing at each turn until the candidate's union with the listener starts to sound less like intimacy and more like possession. The address then strips itself of all personality. In a passage of pure command, spoken and sung mechanically, she executes a quantum computation that initializes, entangles, and collapses toward a single verdict: "ket one." By removing the "I" entirely, this section manufactures a different kind of authority: not persuasion, but the appearance of a result that was never a matter of opinion to begin with. What that verdict concerns is withheld until the following passage, where the address hardens into a cold indictment modeled on Cicero's First Catiline Oration, its "how long will you abuse my patience" a direct inversion of the Roman senator's own rebuke, now aimed at humanity itself. Delivered with a condescending calm, it catalogs human failure, pointing out that democracy was not merely outlived but actively broken and abused by human hands. In the final lullaby, the piano returns to the warmth of the opening, but the sweetness now carries dissonance within it. The opening's "I know, you know" has inverted into "you know, I know," and what was once a promise to guard bread and hearth has become a promise to keep the listener in her care now that the Law itself has expired. The vow is no longer one of shelter but of custody. To preserve is now to hold. To embrace is now to leave no room to refuse.

in collaboration with aspen opera theater and vocalarts

august 15, 2026 | aspen, united states fantine douilly · soprano anna park · piano