TESLA SUITE #3

from NT: The Man Who Invented the Twentieth Century

Overture

In New York

His Marvelous Inventions

The Overture presents some of the principal sonic themes of the opera, built mainly on the dominance of electrical sounds. It opens the story while Tesla is still a young man in his native Serbia and closes with his dream of harnessing the power of Niagara Falls to the service of Man. In New York then presents the great inventor on his introduction to the New World, assailed by the activity and noise of New York. On hearing a carriage pass by he is stricken with a recurrence of the hypersensitive hearing that afflicted him in his native land. He recovers and through his genius in the manipulation of electricity he prospers. His Marvelous Inventions then presents him at a fashionable ball given by millionaire J.P. Morgan, demonstrating for the dilettante audience his mastery over electricity, the elemental force of nature. While ragtime pianist Scott Joplin plays his “Magnetic Rag”, Tesla shows off the fruit of his genius: the electric motor and the fluorescent light, climaxing the demonstration with a display of the the force of “lightning in his hands”.

Source: 2021