THE JOSH GIBSON STORY
PITTSBURGH OPERA PREMIERES NEW WORK ABOUT HOMESTEAD GRAYS STAR JOSH GIBSON
A decade ago, composer Daniel Sonenberg was walking Downtown after his first Pirates game at PNC Park. By that time, he had already been working on his opera about Negro Leagues star Josh Gibson for four years. The opera was nowhere near completion, but while passing by the old Pittsburgh Opera offices in Downtown, he had a revelation.
“Oh my God,” he thought. “This is the place where this opera needs to land.”
Ten years later, Pittsburgh Opera will stage the world premiere production of Mr. Sonenberg’s opera, “The Summer King: the Josh Gibson Story,” which opens Saturday at the Benedum Center, Downtown. The production marks a major moment in the history of Pittsburgh Opera. In recent years, the 78-year-old company has made a tilt toward contemporary opera, but until now, it had never produced a world premiere.
“In a way, we are waving our flag proudly that we are of that group of companies that feel it’s important to do and are able to do it,” general director Christopher Hahn said.
The opera follows the life of Josh Gibson (1911-47), the former Homestead Grays and Pittsburgh Crawfords star who died at age 35, a few months before Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier.
While the juxtaposition of opera and baseball may baffle opera lovers and baseball lovers alike, the story’s central figure, at times tragic and heroic, makes for a natural operatic story, Mr. Sonenberg said. Gibson’s physical gifts were well known — he was reputed to have hit a ball out of Yankee Stadium — but his life presented myriad challenges: systematic racism, mental health issues and the death of his wife in childbirth among them.
“It’s not a super simple operatic drama,” Mr. Sonenberg, 46, said. “I didn’t just want it to be the biopic of Josh Gibson. I wanted to do something more.”
Opera is a notoriously complex art form, but staging on a new work, especially in this visual age, offers many more obstacles: The score must be singable and playable; the musicians must learn to sing and play notes they have never heard; the story must be conducive to the operatic stage; and the stage needs new sets and costumes. On top of that, marketing an opera that nobody has heard, or heard of, proves particularly difficult. It’s a team effort that involves singers, directors, dramaturges, conductors, producers, instrumentalists, composers and librettists.
You don’t have to tell Mr. Sonenberg that. A lifelong baseball lover and an associate professor at the University of Southern Maine, Mr. Sonenberg wrote the first notes of “The Summer King” for an opera workshop in 2003, and he has worked on the project, on and off, ever since. As part of his research, he conducted interviews with Gibson’s family members, pored over old issues of the Pittsburgh Courier and looked at archives at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y.
Sean Gibson, the ballplayer’s greatgrandson and the executive director of the Josh Gibson Foundation, gave Mr. Sonenberg tours of Josh Gibson sites in Pittsburgh and partnered with Pittsburgh Opera to promote “The Summer King.”
“He was really doing his homework on just getting the basics of the Crawford Grill, the Hill District, the jazz,” Sean Gibson said.
Mr. Hahn first heard pieces of “The Summer King” at American Opera Projects’ New Works Forum in 2014, and he later saw a concert performance in Maine by Portland Ovations, which had commissioned the work.
“It was a story made for Pittsburgh, and I did not want to have as our first world premiere something that was esoteric and limited in scope, of interest to a few cognoscenti,” Mr. Hahn said. “I can’t imagine any other subject matter quite allowing us to enter into so many diverse, different parts of the community.”
But Pittsburgh Opera had concerns about the score, and the company asked Mr. Sonenberg to revise it: cutting out some material, adding arias for key characters and making the vocal writing more comfortable for singers. Librettist Mark Campbell joined the team, contributing new lines to the text originally written by Mr. Sonenberg and Daniel Nester.
“I was really struck then, and I continue to be struck at this moment, to the extent to which they want this to succeed artistically and the extent to which they were willing to get into the weeds artistically,” Mr. Sonenberg said of Pittsburgh Opera.
Born and raised in New York City and Long Island, Mr. Sonenberg described himself as a “failed elementary school musician” who caught the music bug while studying the drums, guitar and piano in middle school and high school. While he initially thought of becoming a singersongwriter, he turned to composition at Bard College in New York, under the guidance of Joan Tower, and attended graduate school at the City University of New York, where he wrote his dissertation on Joni Mitchell. The influence of such popular musical idioms will be on display in “The Summer King,” which alludes to jazz and mariachi.
“It’s a very cinematic, quickly flowing series of scenes, and the soundscape can shift and fracture and reform really quite effectively because of the nature of his compositional style,” Mr. Hahn said.
While a world premiere is an impressive feat, Pittsburgh Opera hopes “The Summer King” will take on a life of its own. A second production is scheduled for next year at Michigan Opera Theatre in Detroit.
“My goal is to have this opera in every city that the Negro Leagues played in,” Sean Gibson said.
If all goes to plan, “The Summer King” will live for many more summers.
“My goal is to have this opera in every city that the Negro Leagues played in.” Sean Gibson, great-grandson of Josh Gibson and executive director of the Josh Gibson Foundation