Alan Pierson conducts a rehearsal of the opera “What Belongs to You,” at the Modlin Center for the Arts in Richmond, Va., Sept. 22, 2024. Garth Greenwell’s novel “What Belongs to You” reaches the opera stage with a team that includes the composer David T. Little and the director Mark Morris. (Maansi Srivastava/The New York Times)
NEW YORK, NY.- Composer David T. Little isn’t sure whether it was really his idea to write the opera “What Belongs to You.”
Nine years ago, he was given an advance copy of Garth Greenwell’s debut novel of the same name by his friend and fellow musician Alan Pierson, from the group Alarm Will Sound. As Little read the book, a finely hewed account of desire and shame, and their resonances in an American’s dangerous love for a Bulgarian hustler, he thought: This is a song cycle waiting to happen, if not a full-length opera…