Susan Graham Gatsby" (Jordan Baker), Jake Heggie's "Dead Man Walking" (Sister Helen Prejean), and Tobias Picker's "An American Tragedy" (Sondra Finchley). Graham is a noted champion of the French song repertoire and of songs by contemporary American composers, including Ned Rorem and Lowell Liebermann. Graham made her Carnegie Hall recital debut in April 2003, and a recording of this recital was later released. Graham sang "Bless This House" at George W. Bush's second inauguration on January 20, 2005, and Schubert's "Ave Maria" at the nationally televised funeral mass for Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts on August 29, 2009. She is a
Helen (play) root of all evil. About thirty years before this play, Herodotus argued in his "Histories" that Helen had never in fact arrived at Troy, but was in Egypt during the entire Trojan War. The Archaic lyric poet Stesichorus had made the same assertion in his "Palinode" (itself a correction to an earlier poem corroborating the traditional characterization that made Helen out to be a woman of ill repute). The play "Helen" tells a variant of this story, beginning under the premise that rather than running off to Troy with Paris, Helen was actually whisked away to Egypt by the gods.