Biblical story inspires Sewickley woman's libretto

"I thought it would be easy to get a composer," says Doris Esteban. "It's not. They're very busy."

Ten years ago, Esteban, of Sewickley, wrote the libretto of "Hadassah," a musical drama that will have its world premiere tonight in the North Hills. While teaching the biblical story of Hadassah — also known as Esther — to her sixth-grade Sunday school class, she felt it had great dramatic potential.

Esteban was impressed by Normand Pepin's "Obedient Unto Death," which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, when she heard it performed by Clark Bedford and the Pittsburgh Concert Chorale in 1997. But she didn't get around to calling the composer, who lives in Fairbanks, Alaska, for two years because, she says, she was thinking of a Broadway setting.

Now she's glad she called him. "I sent him my script by e-mail and he was almost immediately enthusiastic," she says.

The story is from the Old Testament's Book of Esther. A Jewish orphan girl named Hadassah is selected by King Xerxes of Persia to become his new queen. The King's vizier, Haman, in a position akin to chief operating officer, has been persecuting the Jews and plans to kill them all, but doesn't know Hadassah's actual roots. Her cousin, Mordecai, appeals to her conscience to save her people. Hadassah overcomes her fears, pleads with the king, confronts Haman, and prevails.

Pepin avoided fancy orchestration in "Hadassah," writing for six vocal soloists, a chorus, woodwind quartet, harp, piano and percussion.

"When I sit down to write," Pepin says, "my first preoccupation is, can I bring to music the sentiments of the poet• That's what I'm supposed to do. I want to express musically each different sentiment. I capture in the opening chorus several emotions, emphasized by key words: 'Life is a wheel that crushes . Time is a cycle that stretches .' On the word 'stretches,' I write from the very bottom up to the top with two sopranos."

After a year's work on "Hadassah," Pepin made a tape for his librettist. "It was not a beautiful tape. I played on a broken-down piano on a lousy tape recorder, with me singing oboe and so forth. I told Doris, ‘If you don't like it you must tell me.'

"But she said the music made her weep."