Leyenda Convention: Courtney Crouse in Concert

Mezzo-soprano Courtney Crouse is Professor of Voice and Vocal Pedagogy at Oklahoma City University, where she mentors the next generation of singers, teachers, and performing artists. Her students have gone on to successful careers in opera, choral music, musical theatre, and on Broadway, reflecting her commitment to developing versatile and expressive artists.

An active performer in the Oklahoma City arts community, Crouse has appeared with Lyric Theatre of Oklahoma and Painted Sky Opera and is a founding member of the Tactus Ensemble. She is a frequent soloist on the Kemp Concert Series and performs with the guitar duo Crouse Denman. Prior to relocating to Oklahoma City, she performed extensively in the New York City area, appearing at Carnegie Hall, Joe’s Pub, and the Bard Summerscape Festival. She was also featured as a soloist with The New York Virtuoso Singers and the acclaimed Baroque ensemble L’Harmonie des Saisons.

Crouse earned her degrees from the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University, where she studied with Paul Kiesgen and Carol Vaness.

She is the founder and artistic director of ECHO, a nonprofit organization dedicated to amplifying and nurturing women’s voices in the arts through performance, collaboration, and education. Drawing on her work in the neuroscience of creativity, she develops innovative programs that empower artists to unlock creative potential and bring new stories to life.

WOMAN: A Modern Frauenliebe und Leben is a genre-defying solo performance where art song recital, cabaret, and autobiographical storytelling collide. Through music, spoken narrative, and theatrical framing, the show reexamines what it has meant—and what it means now—to be a woman, onstage and in the world.

Inspired by Robert Schumann’s Frauenliebe und Leben, a 19th-century song cycle that reduces a woman’s life to love, marriage, and motherhood, the first act responds in dialogue and dissent. Beginning with Schumann’s music, the performance expands outward to reveal the complexity, contradiction, resilience, and wit that have always defined women’s lives—often in spite of how they were portrayed by men. Along the way, we encounter the real women behind the myths, including Clara Schumann and the wild west’s Calamity Jane.

Act One moves through centuries of music by Robert Schumann, Barbara Strozzi, Henry Purcell, Manuel de Falla, and Libby Larsen, illuminating feminine archetypes not as ideals, but as lived realities—messy, powerful, and deeply human.

Act Two turns inward and forward, tracing the performer’s own womanhood through three lenses: Woman as Descendant, exploring Choctaw roots and Native American art song by Louis Ballard; Woman as Lover, through musical theatre and art song by Arlen, Britten, Heggie, Loesser, Strouse, Adams, and Reynolds; and Woman as Teacher and Mother, reflecting legacy, care, and chosen responsibility.

At its heart, the show invites audiences to ask:What kind of woman would YOU have been throughout history—and what kind of woman would you be now?