New opera tunes into life of Apple creator
SANTA FE, New Mexico — It’s 2007, and Steve Jobs has just finished launching the first iPhone before an enraptured audience when he nearly collapses, exhausted by the illness that will kill him four years later.
At this moment in Mason Bates’ opera The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs, a harrowing sound emerges from the orchestra pit, a crushing downward progression that’s described in the score as an “electronic shutdown”.
“It’s a combination of a stand-alone synthesizer with the actual sound on the old Macs of hard drives turning off and one in reverse booting up,” Bates explained in an interview last week at the Santa Fe Opera, where his work will have its world premiere on Saturday.
Bates, 40, enjoys a growing reputation for orchestral scores that combine traditional instrumentation with electronics. Appropriately for the subject of the opera, he composes on two Apple computers, which he will “play” during performances to launch sounds and rhythms at just the right moment.
As an innovator in how music communicates, Bates said he became fascinated by the idea of an opera about Jobs, “the man who changed the way we all communicate”.
He approached librettist Mark Campbell and they agreed on a framework for the piece. In 18 scenes, the opera jumps back and forth through Jobs’ adult life from 1973 to 2011, with a prologue and epilogue that bookend the story in 1965 in the garage of his boyhood home.
Campbell and Bates agreed the opera would neither glorify nor vilify Jobs, a genius innovator but flawed human being who long refused to acknowledge a daughter born out of wedlock and drove his employees and himself ruthlessly.
Matthew Shilvock, San Francisco Opera’s general director, first heard the score at a workshop and said he was “completely blown away by its musicality and humanity”.
Perhaps nowhere are these qualities more evident than in the emotional climax of the opera, with Jobs still in denial about his pancreatic cancer.
“He was searching for inner peace, but it took him a lifetime to get to that place,” Bates said. “And I think his recognition of his mortality helped him get there.”