Allen Shearer and Claudia Stevens, creators of Prospero's Island, have collaborated on ten chamber operas, with recent works including Middlemarch in Spring and Howards End America. Their process in developing Prospero's Island spans a dozen years. It began with an idea to transfer The Tempest, a play about a powerful magician marooned on an island with his daughter, into an opera set off the coast of Argentina in the 1950's. And to transform Prospero, its protagonist, from an enlightened despot who uses his power for good, into a more complex figure with a hidden, darker past. Shakespeare provides hints that his Prospero was not guiltless, and that absolute power can be a force for harm.

The Tempest has had numerous adaptations in film and opera. Artists have been inspired by the play's fantastical characters and story of young love. Shearer and Stevens understood they had something new to bring to their adaptation. The opera's title reflects the broader meaning they sought: that a little kingdom with a supreme ruler is like a remote island. It depends on isolation from the world. Ultimately it cannot withstand the needs of others and the powerful forces of truth and reality. 

Respect for the natural world is a subtext of the opera. For Shakespeare, "unnatural" meant something perverse, destructive, even evil. The opera's Prospero had defied nature. Committing a terrible breach of medical ethics and human decency, he had crossed human  subjects with animals in his lab. Now, fifteen years later, the products of his egregious experiments have grown into troubled teenagers Ariel and Caliban. Despite his desire to atone for his crimes, orchestrating his own capture, Prospero has not given up his attempts to subvert nature and bend it to his will. On his island, he has compelled Falkland penguins to mimic human speech and culture. The opera also will foretell the war yet to come to the Falklands, an even greater violation of the sanctity of nature. Projections that celebrate the untamed magnificence of the Falklands will add powerfully to the opera.  

Prospero's Island is dedicated to the late Shakespeare scholar Everett "Ken" Weedin, with gratitude for his devotion to Shakespeare's language, the timeless content of his plays and the enormity of his vision. Ken encouraged Claudia in her early writing about The Tempest at Vassar and as a reader and critic of an early draft of the opera's libretto updated to modern times.