Steve Jobs’ life examined on stage
Dramatic work explores tech guru who changed human communication
Six years after his death, Steve Jobs remains one of the most controversial men of our time. The cofounder of Apple. had a profound impact on the modern world, yet the details of his life — tumultuous relationships with collaborators and family members, his longtime rejection of his daughter and avoidance of treatment after receiving a cancer diagnosis — are still being debated. Now, an opera with Jobs as its central character is about to take another look at the tech guru. “The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs,” by Bay Area composer Mason Bates and New York-based librettist Mark Campbell, makes its world premiere Saturday at Santa Fe Opera under the direction of Kevin Newbury. One of the most highly anticipated new operas of the year, “Steve Jobs” is destined to travel:
San Francisco Opera has plans to present it in the 2019-20 season; Berkeley’s Cal Performances and Seattle Opera have also signed on as co-producers.
All indications suggest that “Steve Jobs” will not be opera-as-usual. Yet, according to its creators, the work does what opera does best: It gives audiences a glimpse into the inner life of its title character.
“Jobs’ story, as strange as it may sound, is the stuff opera’s made of,” says Bates. “He had such a fascinating life, and his life’s work has impacted the way we all communicate. That topic of human communication, how different people can be represented at the same time in music, is something opera can really do well; a representational medium like film can only scratch the surface of it. I wanted to see how opera can tell that story, and what’s been shocking to me is that a lot of the elements of his life make for such a rich space to explore musically.”
Jobs’ life has been examined in books, feature articles, documentaries and two feature films. But Bates avoided biopic conventions. The opera is nonlinear, he says, with no mention of Jobs’ cancer, no traditional operatic death scene. “I wanted to take a more poetic approach — or what I think of as a pixelated approach,” said Bates.
The opera sets public product launches against private personal turmoil, with themes of communication — and miscommunication — interwoven throughout. “I wanted to create a sense onstage of all these different people, and when they interact, we really hear their music blend, almost like two records on a DJ rig,” said Bates. “That was a way to examine what’s happening with the human condition in the 21st century, with everything mitigated by these sleek little minimalist devices that have one button.”
Campbell, one of contemporary opera’s best-known librettists (he penned the libretto for Kevin Puts’ “Silent Night,” produced at Opera San Jose earlier this season) says that Jobs’ contradictions are essential to the story. “As many people do, I had a kind of prejudice against him,” said Campbell. “He treated some people really badly. But no one can deny the influence that he had on our lives.” The “revolution” of the title, he notes, doesn’t simply refer to Jobs’ innovations — it suggests the profound psychological changes the character undergoes. “Going in, I knew the story had to be as radical as this man was,” he said, “both in his thinking and in his life.”
Today’s audiences seem to be hungry for new operas depicting prominent figures from the 20th century and beyond. John Adams, one of the world’s leading composers, has written operas on Richard Nixon and J. Robert Oppenheimer. Director Newbury recently staged the world premiere of Philip Glass’ “The Perfect American,” about Walt Disney. Campbell, working on commission from San Francisco’s Opera Parallele, is currently writing the libretto for a new work about artist Georgia O’Keeffe. “Opera is changing,” he says. “It isn’t business as usual anymore. Audiences want to see stories relevant to their lives.”
Bates, who lives in Burlingame, may be the ideal composer for “Steve Jobs.” Throughout his career, he’s incorporated electronica in many of his major works. The new score is augmented by processed guitar sounds, samples of Mac computers — “external sounds,” said Bates, “like beeps or the sound of a hard drive spinning” — and gongs, prayer bowls and other Asian instruments reminiscent of Jobs’ interest in Zen Buddhism.
Newbury’s production, which stars Edward Parks as Jobs, mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke as his wife, Laurene, Garrett Sorenson as Steve Wozniak and Wei Wu as Jobs’ spiritual advisor, Kobun Chino Otogawa, is also tech-inspired. “Our main goal was to mirror the philosophy of Apple and Steve Jobs,” said Newbury. “The production uses tech in a provocative and illuminating way, the kind you might see in a Beyoncé or U2 concert, but you don’t see on the opera stage very often. That’s one of the exciting things about opera — it allows us to tell his story with a bit more heightened theatrical imagination. Mason’s score and Mark’s libretto traverse space and time and allow us to imagine how Jobs thought about the world.”
Whether “The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs” will alter public perceptions of its subject remains to be seen. But Bates says that writing the opera changed his view of Jobs.
“People tend to think of him as someone with a combination of Jesuslike charisma and creative spark and a kind of takeno-prisoners, hard-charging mogul,” said the composer. “Both of these are caricatures. As I was writing the piece, I had an experience of Steve Jobs as a regular person, a human being who might have a gaping problem in his life. He really wanted things to be integrated and sleek and smooth and beautifully connected, while all around him, things were kind of frayed at the edges. It must have been a constant challenge for him.
“Seeing that — the public face and the private side — is what this project has helped me to appreciate about Jobs, this countercultural hippie who ended up creating the world’s most valuable company. That’s a huge distance to travel, and it certainly makes for some dramatic inner turmoil.”