Just as English majors hope to write the great American novel, I suppose every musician wants to compose a grand opera. Chris Mohr of KOVD-FM radio has done it.  And it only took him 22 years.

The story begins when he was 19 and rescued a girl from a gang rape.  The incident prompted a life-long struggle with what he terms "the dark side of human nature."

"For two years I had a series of dreams about a fully staged operatic version of what had happened,"  said Mohr, who also operates a Denver marriage chapel with his wife Karen.

He's been writing the music drama ever since.

Titled "From the Realm of the Shadow,"  the eclectic two-hour work is for five soloists, double chorus and chamber orchestra, and it contains no words, only vocalise.

"The reason they don't sing any words is that From The Realm Of The Shadow is any aspect of ourselves that we don't embrace or accept.  The different characters and choruses represent...a fractured psyche." said Mohr, a self-taught composer and devoted Wagnerian.

The musical language ranges from Bach to Shostakovich, with a microtonal section, Indian raga, Ukrainian folk music and a chorus that sounds like Balinese money chant, Mohr said.

The Colorado Symphony performed 10 minutes of the work in 1991.  However, when Mohr mentioned it to Boulder Philharmonic Music Director Theodore Kucher, who also conducts the National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine, said his forces would record the opera if Mohr would finance it.

Last week, Kuchar and Mohr flew to Kiev to begin recording sessions scheduled to last two weeks.  Mohr, who formerly published On the Air Magazine, hopes for a major label release.  "I'm just reeling from all this," he said.

__________________________________________

When I signed aboard the Planet, the kindly and generous perpetrators whose names adorn the masthead assured me that I would never have to deal with another "Nutcracker" or "Messiah," whose ever-increasing numbers up and down the Front Range threaten performance gridlock.  Marvelous as they are, my overdose of these Christmas staples is similar to the effect of the entire chocolate layer cake stolen and consumed as a greedy child.  In any case, :Messiah in its original creation was never intended as a Christmas celebration.  Enough is enough!

And yet, here is a tale of good cheer, with perhaps even a touch of the miraculous.  Chris Mohr is a young man who earns a living as a staff announcer at KVOD-FM, and adds to his current bread by running a successful wedding chapel with his wife, Karen.  He is also a composer, but initial was not burdened by some disciplinary luxuries as knowing how to compose, write orchestral scores, place notes on music paper in a manner intelligible to musicians.

It all started when he was 19 years old and rescued a maiden from an attempted gang rape.  From his thoughts about the incident and considerations of humanity's burdens of evil and blessings of altruistic motivation scane the urge, even the need to create a music drama, which from its earliest vision was called "From the Realm of the Shadow."

He bought a book by Hector Berlioz on orchestration, and armed with some basics and a hit or miss attitude, forged ahead on his complex project.

Mohr's score is eclectic, traveling through motest, Near Eastern belly dancing type harmonies and rhythms, Indian ragas, and folk instruments such as the accordion.

After 22 years of struggling creativity, the deed was done. Now what? Who's going to take a great leap of faith on an unknown composer peddling a possibly quirky product, and stage, record and/or film the work?

Theodore Kuchar, that's who!

Mohr had interviewed the Boulder Philharmonic maestro on his radio show, and they had become friends.  A few months ago, Mohr packed up his entire operatic score, composed, by the way , entirely on computer, and thrust it at Kuchar after a Boulder concert.  Shortly afterward, an invitation arrived from Kuchar.  If Mohr could raise $15,000 required to produce a CD in the Ukraine (that sum would barely cover the cost of a conductor in the United States), then Kuchar, whose beyond Boulder titles include Music Director of the National Orchestra of the Ukraine, would record "From The Realm Of The Shadow: with his Kiev orchestra and local singers and techies.

Mohr performed some twists and turns and came up with the money in time to accompany Kuchar to Ukraine.  Mohr and wife Karen are winding up production on his dream work.

When he returns to Colorado, CD in hand, there remains the further jobs of selling "Realm" to a recording company and lighting some fires under ballet troupes and opera producers.  Having watched him push his fantasy project for 22 years before Dame Fortune decided to endure and succeeds against many odds will make his goal attainable.

__________________________________________

Most Denver area music fans know Chris Mohr as one of the golden-throated announcers at classical radio station KVOD-FM.  But the host of the Saturday morning Broadway musical show and the Sunday might opera program has many talents - one of which has taken him on a creative adventures in far-off Ukraine.

As you read this, Mohr and his wife Karen, (a former KVOD announcer) are in Kiev, recording his three-act opera, From The Realm Of The Shadow.  It's been a long time coming.

"The opera has been 22 years in the making," Mohr said shortly before leaving Denver. Gee, even Beethoven didn't spend that much time on his lengthily struggle to create Fidelio.  But then, Beethoven wasn't self-taught, struggling to conquer the craft of composition as the music was filling his head.  "I hit plenty of blocks along the way, periods where I threw out large amounts of music.  Plus, I was busy making a living," Mohr noted.

In addition to announcing duties, Mohr and his wife ran On The Air Magazine (recently defunct) and currently manage a thriving wedding chapel in Golden.  But all along, Realm remains in the shadows, dating back to his college days.

The opera's inspiration came from a harrowing incident that Mohr witnessed as an undergrad - the gang rape of a woman, an attack cut short by his angry intervention.  Ever since, he'd been grappling with its horror and its meaning.  The attackers were schoolmates who had shown no previous inclination towards such violence.

"I started having these recurring dreams in which the attack occurred as part of a staged show, " Mohr said. "I decided that a dramatic piece might be the way for me to find out the truth in what happened."

But this is no mere retelling of that crime.  For one thing, Realm has no libretto.  These are singers, of course - this is an opera, after all - but the soloists and the two choruses sing wordless part. The text consists solely of "oohs" and "ahs".  Those dreams of his always involved wordless singers, he recalled.  "There are no words to describe some mystical experiences. Mohr explained that "the characters represent different aspects of a shattered psyche.  It starts in the shadow and ends in the light.  The ending takes place in a field of stars.  It is peaceful, totally quiet." His score calls for Renaissance-style motets, belly-dance music and Indian ragas.

It alls sounds very avant-garde, but, on the basis of earlier listening sessions of the work-in-progress, I found the music to be surprisingly accessible and rhythmically enticing.

"It's very tonal," he said of the music, adding that the score calls for such folk instruments as the accordion and zither.  Recording the two hour work in Kiev seems logical, since that region abounds with virtuoso musicians.  But the main reason the Mohrs winged their way to Kiev was the invitation of conductor Theodore Juchar, who serves as music director of the Boulder Philharmonic and the Kiev-based National Orchestra of the Ukraine.  Mohr showed his completed score to Kuchar in Boulder, and the invitation to record the opera came soon after.

To meet the expected production cost of $15,000, Mohr rounded up some corporate support, plus some money of his own, and set off to find reality in his long-held dreams (of the gang rape, as ell as his fantasy of recording Realm). No record label has been approached yet, though the connections Mohr made through his tenure with On The Air, a classical-music magazine, couldn't hurt.  A movie version of Realm would be the ideal, he suggested.

Will any of this ever see the light of day?  Mohr was unsure, though he remains optimistic.  "I once got some good advice, "he said.  "First , create something - then worry about the marketing.  The way my life has gone, I can't solve anything in the standard way, mainly because I don't know what the standard way is."

__________________________________________

After a week's worth of intense recording sessions in Kiev, Ukraine, KVOD announcer/self-taught composer Chris Mohr returned to Denver with more than a batch of tapes of his opera, In the Realm of the Shadow - he came home last week with a an appreciation for the good life in America. "On the night we arrived, more than 100 people froze to death in Kiev," Mohr said, adding that 350 villages in the region were without heat, a s temperatures hovered at around minus 20.  Though he had high praise to the "amazing talented" musicians (vocal soloist, double chorus, orchestration and folk instrumentalists), Mohr grave highest praise to the orchestatia musicians, whom he witnessed crammed into a small, chilly room, rehearsing Schubert with gloves on. "They work under very bad conditions," he said, "but they have very high spirits."