WNO announces third commission for hour-long opera

If you can write a twenty-minute-long opera, you can move on to an hour-long opera. And if you can write an hour-long opera, you can write a full-length work. This is the premise behind the Washington National Opera's American Opera Initiative, which went out of the gate in 2012 with an evening of three short works, and continued with an hour-long work -- Approaching Ali, by D. J. Sparr -- the following spring.