Is This 25-Year-Old Composer The Great Hope Of American Opera?

There are more established young composers who write operas, but if contemporary opera has a rising wunderkind, then Aucoin has to be it — although his promise as a composer, conductor, pianist, poet and critic extends well beyond opera or any other single form. The conductor Johannes Debus says that the range of Aucoin’s talents exemplifies “Gesamtkunstwerk, Wagner’s term for everything at once.”