IN Series Premieres Timothy Nelson's Opera, The Song of Sakuntala

2025–2026 has been a season of premières for Washington opera company IN Series, and will conclude with another: the first-ever performance of an opera composed by its Artistic Director, Timothy Nelson. He wrote The Song of Sakuntala a decade ago, with much encouragement from his mentor and friend Peter Sellars, without expecting or planning for it to ever be heard or seen.

Inspiration for this opera came principally from a play by the revered Sanskrit writer Kālidāsa, believed to have lived sometime before the fifth century: The Recognition of Śakuntalā elaborates upon a narrative from the Mahābhārata, the great Sanskrit epic and a fundamental text in Hinduism (arguably its most famous section is the Bhagavad Gita). The Recognition of Śakuntalā has been a source for other operatic adaptations, including an unfinished work by Franz Schubert and a 1920 opera by Franco Alfano (who also penned its libretto). Nelson crafted the libretto for The Song of Sakuntala — not from the Kālidāsa text, but from more recent authors, namely Vidyapati (c. 1352–1448), Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) and Sarojini Naidu (1879–1949). Both the scoring and compositional style of the opera blend western and South Asian influences: the instrumentation consists of tabla, sitar, tanpura, violin, oboe and viola da gamba, and the score draws on elements found in Indian classical music. There’s even a kind of leitmotif of a rising major sixth that is often used in representations of the title character. 

I spoke with Timothy Nelson about The Song of Sakuntala.

He also created two videos to introduce audiences to this opera.

Part 1

Part 2