Can an opera on the civil rights era change the world?
Soprano Whitney Morrison steps to the center of the rehearsal room and tears into her aria:
“Who really cares where you sit on the bus, “As long as you get where you’re
goin’,” she cries.
As it happens, many people — blacks, whites and shades between — cared a great deal about where they sat on the bus and in America’s bus terminals as the civil rights era gathered momentum.
Some dared to take action. They called themselves Freedom Riders, and in 1961 they clambered onto buses across the country, sitting where they pleased.
When they arrived at Southern bus stations, they were greeted with bats and clubs, beaten, hospitalized and often sent to prison. Yet they continued to ride, armed only with the knowledge that they had the legal right to do so — and the guts to try to prove it.
“Well, I seen what they do,”
Morrison chants, emotion rising.
“I seen people die.
“I seen my brother die.
“So why do I care where I sit on that bus?”
That last query stands at the crux of “Freedom Ride,” an opera by Dan Shore that will receive its world premiere Feb. 8 at the Studebaker Theater. Commissioned by Chicago Opera Theater, the two-act opus brings to the operatic stage a chapter of American history nearly forgotten by our popular culture but here revived in passionate tones.
By the time Morrison finishes her devastating aria, the room erupts with applause, interrupting the rehearsal at Curtiss Hall, on the 10th floor of the Fine Arts Building on South Michigan Avenue. Director Tazewell Thompson rushes up to composer-librettist Shore, who seems startled by the reaction.
“Why didn’t you write something with feeling?” Thompson quips to Shore, tongue deeply in cheek. “Something with a feeling of jazz and blues!”
Of course, as Thompson’s jocular remarks suggest, Shore has done exactly that, creating an opera steeped in the rhythms and cadences of black culture, but one that also embraces the highflown melodies that opera listeners expect.
“Freedom Ride” approaches its fraught subject in an unexpected way. For rather than documenting clashes that occurred between Freedom Riders and armed vigilantes, the opera steps back to the hours, days and weeks before the Freedom Rides. Its fictional story concerns Sylvie Davenport, an African American woman in her early 20s who is inexorably drawn into the civil rights movement, even though practically everyone around her — including soprano Morrison’s character, Leonie Baker — urges her not to join the Freedom Riders.
Why rock the boat, they say? Why leave school? Why risk your life?
Those are the questions that Shore chose to explore.
“These people were fighting a particular kind of oppression, and I didn’t want to put those pressures onstage,” says Shore, who began work on the opera nine years ago.
“You shouldn’t put characters onstage unless you really understand and sympathize with them and can make them fully threedimensional. That wasn’t a leap I wanted to make.
“I didn’t want an aria of a guy with a baseball bat singing passionately about why he needed to hit people after they got out of the bus.
“This is about normal people trying to be brave.”
Or, as Shore put it in his “Freedom Ride” background notes, “I chose early on not to pit these people against a physical external enemy. There are not police who sing in the opera, no prejudiced politicians, no dangerous white supremacists. The drama in ‘Freedom Ride’ comes from the conflicts between the individual Freedom Riders, and from what William Faulkner, perhaps the greatest chronicler of the South and its race relations, famously described as ‘the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself.’ ”
In so doing, Shore has brought an epic social conflict down to human scale, as we see characters struggling to decide whether to join the battle, to fight for a heroic cause, to put their lives on the line.
“This is an intimate story about how this one young college student, female, is drawn into the Freedom Ride,” explains director Thompson.
“She’s drawn in because there’s a love interest, and then she gets completely involved. Her mother and her brother desperately do not want her to be a part of it. As an older black woman living in America, the idea of her daughter getting on a bus — an integrated bus — even though integration is legal, she was terrified that something might happen to her.” For good reason.
“It was a very bloody and horrifying journey,” adds Thompson. “The Trailway buses, the Greyhound buses, and there were several that went out across the country, through the Deep South, from Washington to New Orleans. It was harrowing, and people were practically bludgeoned to death. There were mobs waiting for them with bats and lead pipes and chains, and in one place someone had a pitchfork. A pitchfork!”
This turbulent story drew composer-librettist Shore’s interest in 2011, when he was teaching music at Xavier University of Louisiana, in New Orleans, and was invited by the Longue Vue House and Gardens there to see if he could “come up with some way of celebrating New Orleans and the civil rights movement,” he recalls.
Shore had seen a bit about the Freedom Riders on the PBS documentary “Eyes on the Prize” and explored further. The more he learned, the more he realized the all-American character of the Freedom Rider story.
“What impressed me so much about them was how many hundreds of people who had participated in this movement,” Shore remembers. “From all over the country, North and South, Jews and Christians, black and white.”
The first Freedom Riders — whose ranks famously included U.S. Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., — suffered terribly, and “a large number of student activists were imprisoned in the infamous Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman,” Shore writes in his background notes.
Therefore “the second wave of volunteers knew exactly what they were getting into,” he says. “They had seen it on TV. They knew when they got on the bus, they were going straight to prison.
“What does it take for someone to do this: I’m going on the bus, probably will get beaten, definitely will go to jail, but this is the time in my life that there’s something right I can do. A positive step I can do to repair the world.”
That phrase “repair the world” and its Hebrew translation, “Tikkun olam,” both appear in the opera’s libretto, sung by a Jewish character who joins the Freedom Riders.
Despite the opera’s noble intentions — or perhaps because of them — Shore’s journey to this point has been arduous and painful. Uncounted workshops at churches, universities, conferences and whatnot took place as Shore wrote, expanded and refined the piece, the journey filled with “all these horrible disappointments and problems along the way,” he says.
But several years ago conductor Lidiya Yankovskaya — who became Chicago Opera Theater’s music director in 2017 — learned that Shore was working on the piece and was intrigued by it.
“I just hooked on to it,” she says.
Why?
“To me, it’s the story. Sylvie Davenport, the principal character, is inspiring and so unlike other characters that I generally tend to encounter in opera. She’s a young woman who is, first of all, exceptional for her time, a university student driven in the way she is.
“To start out, she has real fear and is very vulnerable — maybe fear is not the right word. (She has) skepticism about the Freedom Riders, about the civil rights movement.
“And over the course of the opera, we see her develop into someone who has strong convictions about this movement. It’s so relevant. We all see things in the world that we disagree with or that frighten us or that are unfair.”
The question is whether Sylvie Davenport — and by implication, the rest of us — will do anything about it.
What also drew Yankovskaya to “Freedom Rider” was its score, its intensely lyrical phrases immersed in jazz, blues and gospel sensibilities, judging by what I heard at the recent rehearsal.
Yet this may raise a delicate question among some listeners: Should a white composer be telling a story steeped in African American history and expressed, to a degree, via African American musical idioms?
That question also has been aimed at the greatest American opera, George Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess,” a work to which “Freedom Rider” is clearly indebted.
I’d argue that a work’s quality is what matters, not its author’s identity.
“I’ll be honest with you — it’s something I think about all the time,” says composer-librettist Shore.
“What I’ve tried very hard to do is to seek as much input from everybody as possible. I was extremely fortunate to have been working with my students and the faculty at Xavier when I was doing this. I could never in a million years have conceived an opera without them,” adds Shore, who now teaches at Boston Conservatory at Berklee.
“I would write lines for them to sing. I would ask them: ‘How is this?’
“They would say: ‘Well, we wouldn’t say this, but we might say that.’
“Or I would write something, they would go onstage, they would sing it differently, and I would say: ‘You’re right, I’m wrong, I’m going to change that.’ ”
In the end, “There’s only so much I can do,” adds Shore. “I was born the way I was born. Even though I’m composer and librettist, I’ve tried to be as much as possible a collaborator with the entire community.”
Along these lines, Shore also discussed the project with original Freedom Riders.
But perhaps director Thompson argues most compellingly for Shore’s endeavor.
“What is a writer for?” he asks in an email. “To be artistically and emotionally handcuffed or set free to tell whatever tale she or he concocts and wishes and chooses to tell? The writer’s tool chest requires empathy and imagination; keen observation; wondering, questioning and remembering; experience with living in the world and developing a strong point of view; a love of people and language.
“One needn’t be an apostle to write about Christ.”
With the work’s nearly decadelong gestation now nearly ended, the principals hope not only for a successful production but for a long life ahead for “Freedom Rider” and its message.
“My dream — and I’m sure that everyone who writes an opera says the same thing — is really that young people come in off the streets, maybe never having seen an opera before, and see themselves onstage and say: This is something about me, this is something I understand, this is something that resonates with me,” says Shore.
“If we’re lucky, maybe they’ll say: When I see injustice done, there’s something I can do.”
To director Thompson, “Freedom Ride” is not just about a historic era. It’s about now.
“This story means a great deal to me, because I feel in today’s divisive climate, we’re not fighting to sit next to each other on buses, but there’s so much that’s going on in the country right now in terms of the separation of cultures, the separation of races,” says Thompson.
“On Martin Luther King Jr.’s (holiday), there were gatherings across the country for the rights of gun owners. And it’s astonishing that they chose that day to carry weapons, machine guns, combat guns, MK-whatevers.
“So the fight is not over. In fact, there’s a return, it seems, to the days before there was an acceptance that black people and people of color (are) human beings.”
Music, however, has a way of moving people beyond entrenched positions.
Come Feb. 8, the forces behind “Freedom Ride” will make their attempt at repairing the world.
“What does it take for someone to do this: I’m going on the bus, probably will get beaten, definitely will go to jail, but this is the time in my life that there’s something right I can do. A positive step I can do to repair the world.”
— Dan Shore, in his background notes for the opera ‘‘Freedom Ride’’
“Freedom Ride” plays at 7:30 p.m. Feb. 8 (sold out) and 14, and 3 p.m. Feb. 16, at the Studebaker Theater, 410 S. Michigan Ave.; $45-$150; 312-704-8414 or chicagooperatheater.org.