“Robert Ashley is not only an opera composer, but the greatest opera composer of the last half-century… . Ashley’s texts are poetic; they are, in fact, epic poems. Some of them, in my opinion, are among the greatest epic poems in the English language. They are made of episodes and are meant to be heard—read aloud. More than anyone else, Ashley has remade opera from the ground up as an American form: not just poetic but vernacular, not only for stage but for television, not originating in musical notation but in spoken speech and electronic technology.” —Kyle Gann

This definitive text of Atalanta (Acts of God), which has been performed internationally since the 1980s, includes the entire libretto and an afterword by Ashley, compiled and edited by Sumner Carnahan.