Baseball, the opera of sports
The tragic aspect of Josh Gibson’s life makes it ripe for stage, as Pittsburgh Opera will show with ‘The Summer King’
Though not much more than doggerel, Ernest L. Thayer’s “Casey at the Bat,” first published in 1888, was successfully performed on Broadway by vaudevillian DeWolf Hopper, who, by his estimate, went on to recite the poem around the country more than 10,000 times.
By the early 20th century, the poem had became so popular that Albert G. Spalding’s “America’s National Game,” generally regarded as one of the first attempts at an official history of baseball, cited “Casey at the Bat” as the best baseball poem ever written. Spalding declared, “Love has its sonnets galore; war its epics in heroic verse; Tragedy its sombre story in measured lines; and baseball has ‘Casey at the Bat.’”
Over the generations, the tributes to Thayer’s mighty Casey have ranged from a statue in the Baseball Hall of Fame to a Walt Disney cartoon. Former American Poet Laureate Donald Hall, in an essay on baseball’s best poetry, claimed “Casey at the Bat” as the best known of all baseball poems: “Everybody knows ‘Casey at the Bat.’ ”
In 1948, a year after Jackie Robinson crossed baseball’s color line, William Schuman became the first composer to receive the Pulitzer Prize in Music for his adaptation of Walt Whitman’s poems into Secular Cantata No. 2, “A Free Song.” A passionate baseball fan, Schuman went on to compose “The Mighty Casey,” an adaptation of “Casey at the Bat.” The opera was first performed in 1953 and eventually made its way to Cooperstown for a production by the Glimmerglass Opera.
In his review of the 1986 Glimmerglass performance, Tom Page, writing for The New York Times, praised Schuman’s opera for recasting Mr. Thayer’s Casey: “It is no longer the story of a strutting boor whose arrogance loses the day for town and teammates. ... It is about the fall of a village small-town hero — who, like Prufrock, sees the moment of his greatness flicker — and his redemption through love.”
While Schuman brought a sense of humanity to the blustering Casey with his opera, Daniel Sonenberg, resident composer at the University of Southern Maine, saw opera, with its emotional power, as the medium for a story about a real-life Casey, a player who was larger-than-life on the field but, off-the field, was haunted by forces that denied his greatness and eventually destroyed him. He found his story, “an American historical story,” in the tragic life of Negro League great Josh Gibson, and called it “The Summer King.”
Gibson was such a powerful hitter that he became known as the black Babe Ruth. When with the Pittsburgh Crawfords, he was a teammate of the legendary Satchel Paige. Later, when Paige was pitching for the Kansas City Monarchs and Gibson was catching for the Homestead Grays, their dramatic confrontations drew thousands of fans, white and black, to ballparks, including Pittsburgh’s Forbes Field.
Gibson and Paige believed they had earned the right to be the first Negro League players to integrate Major League Baseball and were bitter when they learned that Branch Rickey had passed over them and signed Robinson.
While Paige eventually pitched in the majors, Gibson, struggling with alcohol and drugs during his career, suffered a brain hemorrhage at the age of 35, and died on Jan. 20, 1947, just three months before Robinson played his first game with the Dodgers. The Pittsburgh Courier’s Wendell Smith, the first AfricanAmerican to be selected for the writers’ wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame, wrote in an obituary that had Gibson been given the chance to play in the major league, “he might be living today.”
Mr. Sonenberg decided to call his opera “The Summer King” because Josh Gibson “was the king of summer, but did not get to enjoy autumn.” He regarded Gibson’s story as a “civil rights struggle that predated the Civil Rights era.” Rather than the black Babe Ruth, Mr. Sonenberg saw Gibson as baseball’s Moses, who led African-American ballplayers to “the promised land” but never had the opportunity to play there.
In May 2014, “The Summer King,” with the support of the National Endowment of the Arts, made its debut as a concert performance in Portland, Maine. But it is only fitting, because of the city’s major role in Negro League history, that the first staged performance of the opera take place in Pittsburgh. On April 29 and May 2, 5, and 7, the Pittsburgh Opera will present the world premiere of “The Summer King” at the Benedum Center. It was in May, 70 years ago, that Jackie Robinson played his first major league game in Pittsburgh.
Gibson and Satchel Paige believed they had earned the right to be the first Negro League players to integrate Major League Baseball and were bitter when they learned that Branch Rickey had passed over them and signed Jackie Robinson.