The performance "The Verismo Project (Franz Hartwig, A Most Wanted Man)" features the young German actor Franz Hartwig, who played the part of Karl in the 2014 film "A Most Wanted Man", the last movie Philip Seymour Hoffman starred in before his death. In the film, Hartwig appears in a number of scenes and has two lines: "It’s currency, maybe" and "They are moving". For this iteration of his Verismo Project, Ari Benjamin Meyers has composed a short opera for solo voice specifically to be performed by Franz Hartwig with a duration equal to his screen time in the film and using his lines as the basis for the libretto. The opera is staged in the setting of the film’s original presentation, namely a cinema.
The Verismo Project is an ongoing series of in-situ reality based operatic performances composed by Ari Benjamin Meyers.