Facing Goya
It is an expansion of their one-act opera called Vital Statistics from 1987, dealing with such subjects as physiognomy, eugenics, and its practitioners, and also incorporates a musical motif from Nyman's art song, "The Kiss", inspired by a Paul Richards painting.The Art Banker also speaks narration into a dictaphone, but this was omitted from the studio recording, though the lines are reprinted in the booklet.The libretto calls for "a Goyaesque landscape of bare branches with bloody clothes hanging off them, and stones jutting out of the earth like gravestones, in the manner of a charcoal drawing."The Microbiologist (Soprano 1) "wears a thigh length zip top, leather miniskirt, and stud earrings."Nyman's own label, MN Music, reissued the opera with a cover featuring his own photograph of a mass of dolls wrapped in plastic, in 2011.