George Antheil was born in Trenton, NJ in 1900 ,and grew up there near the State prison. He died in New York in 1959, and is buried in Trenton. He was on the edge as a "bad boy" pianist and avant-garde composer in various world capitals from the 20's to the early 30's, where he seemed to know everyone including Stravinsky, Ezra Pound, Hemingway, and James Joyce. He settled in Hollywood to write film scores in 1936. The 33 film scores he wrote include "The Pride and the Passion" and for the 1950 Humphrey Bogart classic film noir "In a Lonely Place". Other pursuits included mystery writing, writing an advice column, and, with the help of actress Hedy Lamarr, inventing a device to help direct torpedoes by protecting their radio frequencies. His auto-biography, "The Bad Boy of Music," came out in 1945.
In the late 1940's and early 1950's he wrote several operas, including the one-act opera from 1954 we have this week on the Lyric Stage, "The Brothers". Antheil himself wrote the libretto based on the Cain and Abel story from the Bible. The setting is the kitchen of Mary and Abe, shortly after WW2. Joe, Abe's brother also lives there, and a pre-war flirtation between Joe and Mary re-kindles, but is cut off by the faithful Mary. But Joe is not who he seems. He is an escaped prisoner who turned traitor during the war and brutally interrogated his comrades, two of whom appear for revenge. Cornered and filled with jealousy, Joe stabs and kills his brother Abe, and in turn he is shot and wounded by one of his former comrades, and thus he now has the mark of Cain. The opera ends with Mary cradling Abe's body.