San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Oratorios make weighty historic events sing
When it comes to illuminating some salient chapter of American history, there are a host of different media available for the task. There are thick prose tomes, whether intended for a scholarly or a popular audience. There are cinematic and television documentaries.
And then there are contemporary oratorios, using the resources of an orchestra and chorus to investigate aspects of our nation’s past.
Move over, Ken Burns. America’s classical composers are on the job.
By a fluky turn of scheduling, two such works cross paths in the Bay Area this month. On Friday, May 19, the Oakland Symphony gave the world premiere of “Bodies on the Line,” Martinez composer Martin Rokeach’s evocation of the United Auto Workers’ successful 1936-37 sit-down strike against General Motors.
The San Francisco Symphony is poised to follow suit on Thursday, May 25, and Saturday, May 27, with the West Coast premiere of “Her Story,” a celebration of women’s suffrage by the Pulitzer Prizewinning American composer Julia Wolfe. Guest conductor Giancarlo Guerrero and the women’s chorus Lorelei Ensemble, who gave the piece its world premiere in Nashville in September, will take part.
Taken in tandem, these two works, and others like them, hint at the expressive and theatrical potential of sung words to explore great historic events and their implications. That’s true even when the treatment includes no overt dramatic narrative of the kind that might give an opera its structure.
If anything, the relative plotlessness of an oratorio can allow for a distinctive kind of outreach to the audience, one based less on individuals or dramatic characters than on sweeping brushes that take in entire communities of people.
Wolfe has been a pioneer of this kind of creation. Her prize-winning 2014 oratorio “Anthracite Fields” drew on historical research and firsthand interviews to create an abrasive, tender picture of the world of midcentury coal miners in southeastern Pennsylvania.
Four years later, she returned to labor history for “Fire in My Mouth,” a piece about the deadly 1911 fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York, in which 146 garment workers — overwhelmingly poor immigrant women — died. “Her Story,” which was commissioned to celebrate the passage of the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote, encompasses a vast swath of American history, from the 18th century to the present day.
At no point, she told me in a phone conversation, was she tempted to use opera as a resource to approach these subjects, in part because of the appeal of choral singers.
“The choral world right now is so exciting. I wrote a choral piece back in graduate school, and there was a general sense then that things were a little dusty in the chorus,” she said. “But now there are these great choruses, with incredible musicians. And so in a piece like ‘Anthracite Fields,’ there are some sections that are sort of in character, but no one’s singing
to each other or acting out dialogue or anything like that.”
Rokeach’s hour-long work was originally conceived as an opera, he said. But that plan, which he now calls “a delusional fantasy,” gave way to the current oratorio at the suggestion of librettist Rebecca Engle.
The subject, the great Flint sit-down strike in Michigan, is remembered as one of the turning points in the history of the U.S. labor movement. Beginning shortly after Christmas 1936, members of the fledgling UAW occupied the GM plant for 44 days, winning contract concessions and transforming the union into the powerhouse it later became.
“I grew up outside of Flint, and even though the strike was behind us, everyone remembered it,” Rokeach told me. “It was a national issue at the time. Every American had an opinion about the strike, and about the stokers — whether
they were heroic workers fighting for their dignity or criminal trespassers.”
Rokeach and Engle, together with his wife Deborah, researched the project like graduate students in history, doing a deep 14-day dive into the archives in Detroit and surrounding cities.
“It was like a huge fishing expedition,” he recalled. “We didn’t really know what we were looking for. But we came back with a mountain of material and letters handwritten by strikers, and some of those letters have been set to music for the oratorio.”
One of their most fortuitous finds, Rokeach said, was a daily diary kept by a worker named Francis O’Rourke.
“He had real literary talent. It’s a beautiful diary, my favorite single item out of all that mountain of material,” he said, noting that O’Rourke’s grandchildren are flying in from Texas for the performance.
Wolfe, too, began her project on women and the vote as she always does, with voluminous reading on the subject. That’s what persuaded her to take a broader historical view of the matter than just the passage of the 19th Amendment.
“It’s a long conversation, dating back to our beginning as a country,” she said. “So I started with a letter from Abigail Adams to John Adams, which reads, ‘I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous or more favorable than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of husbands. Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could.’ ”
Verbal texts, Wolfe said, have always been important to her, going back to her days as a student in history and sociology at the University of Michigan. Combining them with music presented a way to treat weighty topics, including climate change, which is the subject of her next composition.
“With texts, though, I try not to be didactic,” she added. “Obviously I have opinions, and you can sort of tell my political bent. But I’m hoping it’s a conversation starter.
“I’m looking at the history and going, ‘Whoa, I can’t believe that!’ So I’m an observer of the history, and then I’m sharing that with everybody.”
Music, it seems, is a perfect way to make that sharing possible.