Alberto Gonzales: The Opera

Yes, that’s the opera based on the transcripts of the former attorney general’s bumbling testimony about the U.S. attorney firing scandal back in 2007.

A 29-year-old Australian, Melissa Dunphy, wrote the opera in part because she felt sorry for Gonzales, as she tells the Wall Street Journal. It’s called The Gonzales Cantata.

“I wrote the piece as an exploration of someone who’s having a hard time arguing his way out of a situation,” she says. “I think had Dick Cheney or Don Rumsfeld been put in the same situation, they could have acquitted themselves much better. But Gonzales, it appeared to me, didn’t have wit or the foresight about him to wriggle his way out of it.”

That’s for sure.

Scott Horton says an opera is a fitting way to capture the Gonzales tragedy: “The career path of Alberto Gonzales provides perfect material for an opera in the tradition of George Frederick Handel. It has its earnest moments, flashes of heroism (involving Gonzales’s victims, of course, not the protagonist), and yet there is a steady undercurrent of opera buffa.”

Gonzales is played in the opera by a female soprano, part of a “protest of male domination of American politics,” as Dunphy explains on the opera’s Website.