San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Joshua Kosman: Opera and Cali have long gone together.
California and opera go back a long way together — practically to the founding of the one, though not the other.
No sooner had the masses of FortyNiners poured into the region in search of gold than an entire industry sprang up to keep them entertained with performances of Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor” and Verdi’s “Ernani.”
As the author George Martin lays it out in superlative detail in his 1993 history “Verdi at the Golden Gate,” opera was central to San Francisco’s cultural economy during the Gold Rush. The divas were imported from Europe, but the entrepreneurs and patrons were decidedly homegrown.
It took another several decades, though, before Californians found themselves on the other side of the footlights, depicted onstage rather than watching from the stalls. And when it happened — with Puccini’s 1910 oater “La Fanciulla del West” (“The Girl of the Golden West”), set in and around the mining camps of Northern California — the miners were once again the focus.
Over the ensuing century, there have been a number of notable operas set in the Golden State — melodramas, biographical portraits, historical set pieces. They vary in scope and style, but what they all share is a fascination with the setting itself.
Whenever California figures onstage, in other words, it’s never simply a generic setting. It’s always a character in the drama.
“La Fanciulla del West” is a paradigmatic example. Even if the more jaded sophisticates in the audience are tempted to giggle at the groups of roughhewn miners singing in florid Italianate phrases, there’s no mistaking the geographical specificity of the piece.
That’s not to say it’s a documentary, of course; Puccini used California as a vehicle for his own dramaturgical concerns, which were steeped in the world of Italian opera. But even an imagined setting can assert its own demands, and “Fanciulla” is inextricable from its milieu; any director who tried to stage the piece in ancient Rome or on Mars would (I hope) be laughed out of the opera house.
“Fanciulla” forms a bookend with “Girls of the Golden West” (that’s girls, plural), the opera by Berkeley composer John Adams and librettistdirector Peter Sellars that had its world premiere at the San Francisco Opera in 2017. Where Puccini’s Gold Rush California is vividly imagined, that of Adams and Sellars is factually grounded almost to a fault, built on diary entries and news clippings and firsthand reportage.
We can leave questions of artistic success for another time (the work has its devotees, of which I am not one) and still agree that “Girls” creates a headlong, immersive plunge into the world of 19th century California. From the raucous seediness of life in the mining towns to the hardscrabble beauty of the landscape, this is a work deeply rooted in the specifics of that time and place.
Within the parameters delineated by those two works lie a handful of other Californiabased operas in which the state itself is key.
The operatic biography “Harvey Milk,” by composer Stewart Wallace and librettist Michael Korie, is unsurprisingly steeped in the particulars of life in San Francisco — not just the flourishing of the gayrights movement in the Castro, but also the broader demographic and economic currents that helped push Milk’s assassin, Supervisor Dan White, into murderous despair.
I traveled to Houston in 1995 for the work’s world premiere, where it was affecting but slightly out of place. Not until “Harvey Milk” came “home” to the San Francisco Opera a year later did it seem entirely in its element.
Similarly, “The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs,” the musically forceful (though weirdly hagiographic) account of the birth of Apple and the iPhone by composer Mason Bates and librettist Mark Campbell, takes its dramatic shape from the lineaments of Silicon Valley culture.
Both operas, by the way, are among the many regrettable casualties of the COVID19 pandemic. “Steve Jobs” was due for its San Francisco Opera premiere in 2020 (after a world premiere at the Santa Fe Opera), and Opera Parallèle had announced plans to revive “Harvey Milk” in a newly slimmeddown version.
In canvassing for California-themed operas, I was reminded of the efforts of Sonoma City Opera. The company now seems to be inactive, but in decades gone by it commissioned and premiered such works as “The Dreamers,” a 1996 opera by San Francisco composer David Conte, based in the region’s history; and “Every Man Jack,” Libby Larsen’s 2006 operatic portrait of the California author Jack London.
The writings of John Steinbeck, an author even more closely linked with California, have been turned to opera on at least two notable occasions. There is Carlisle Floyd’s “Of Mice and Men,” which has been performed throughout the U.S. since its 1970 premiere in Seattle, including a 1997 production at Opera San José. And composer Ricky Ian Gordon enjoyed success with his 2007 opera “The Grapes of Wrath,” in which the nomadic Joad family winds up in California.
No doubt there are other instances of California operas that I overlooked. But I’ll be very surprised if there are many in which California is just a neutral background, a black box for a drama that could’ve happened anywhere.
Our state is too vibrant, too distinctive, too beautiful to be consigned to the sidelines. Everyone in the operatic world knows it.