View will present Francesca Zambello and the Glimmerglass Festival preview of the opera An American Tragedy on Tuesday, August 20, 2013 at 5:30 p.m. in Gould Hall. Glimmerglass Festival Artistic & General Director Francesca Zambello and singers from the 2013 season will present a program about the opera, An American Tragedy, by composer Tobias Picker and libretto by Gene Scheer.

Based on the Theodore Dreiser novel about the murder of Grace Brown, whose body was found in Big Moose Lake in 1906, An American Tragedy had its world premiere at the Metropolitan Opera in 2005, directed by Zambello. It will be given an original new staging at Glimmerglass in 2014, with a score revised by the composer and librettist. Zambello will talk about the process of bringing this opera to the stage at the Met and the exciting revisions that will be premiered at the Glimmerglass Festival in 2014. Excerpts from the opera, including a new aria, will be performed.

An American Tragedy is the fictionalized version of the Grace Brown murder. Chester Gillette and Brown, who had been pressuring him to marry her and to take care of their unborn child, took a rowboat out on the lake where he clubbed her with a tennis racquet and left her to drown. Gillette was arrested for the murder at a nearby hotel in Inlet. The subsequent trial became known as “The Trial of the Century” and, among other adaptions,  was made in the 1951 film A Place in the Sun starring Elizabeth Taylor, Montgomery Clift, and Shelley Winters.

This is a free event offered to the public with support by area sponsors. There will be a small reception at 5:30 p.m. with the one-hour preview at 6 p.m. followed by a Q&A with Ms. Zambello. Reservations are not required, but there is limited seating.

View is located at 3273 State Route 28 in Old Forge. To learn more about View programming and other upcoming performances please visit their website at www.viewarts.org. There phone number is (315) 369-6411.

Photo: Above, Chester Gillette and Grace Brown. Below, a still from the 1931 film version, co-written by Theodore Dreiser.