‘Howards End’ now an American opera about race
It’s hard to imagine “Howards End” taking place anywhere but Edwardian England. E.M. Forster’s 1910 novel illuminates the rigid British class structure with devastating specificity.
But a new chamber opera has given the novel a distinctly American setting — one that evokes similar stratification in post-World War II Boston.
“Howards End, America” makes its world premiere this weekend at Z Space, and the work’s creators, librettist Claudia Stevens and composer Allen Shearer, say that Forster’s novel made the leap across the pond with surprising ease.
“We wanted to bring this story to an American audience,” says Stevens, “and it came to us that the divisions over class in England are the same divisions we have in America over race. That became central to the adaptation, and it has worked wonderfully. As an opera that speaks to America, it’s spot on.”
Stevens had wanted to adapt a Forster novel for years; “Howards End” had the right mix of love, betrayal and dramatic intensity. “The themes of the novel are so interesting to me,” she explained, “hypocrisy and that denial of feeling that Forster often wrote about.”
The novel follows the Schlegel sisters — liberal Margaret and her more radical sister Helen — as they trace the dividing line between rich and poor. At one end of the
social spectrum are the wealthy Wilcoxes, owners of the country estate Howards End; on the other are Leonard Bast and his mistress, Jackie, a downwardly mobile couple whom Margaret and Helen endeavor to help.
Updating the story to the 1950s — the era of McCarthy witch hunts, racial conflict and postwar angst — allowed Shearer and Stevens, Berkeley-based creative partners who are also husband and wife, to explore American barriers of race and class with immediacy.
In their most significant
change to Forster’s original, white Leonard Bast is now an African-American poet. The character echoes Forster’s famous line, “only connect,” in an anguished aria.
“It’s an important line, and we do refer to it several times,” said Stevens. “It becomes sort of a leitmotif in the opera. It’s a line that has more than one level: It means not only ‘connect with other people,’ but also somehow to make the connection in your own mind about moral issues.”
With a cast featuring sopranos Nikki Einfeld
and Sara Duchovnay as the sisters and tenor Michael Dailey as Leonard, Stevens says they took special care to delineate the characters. “We tried to make them a little more contrasting,” she said. “Margaret is a little more prim, while Helen is more of a maverick. She’s a hothead in some ways — reckless, taking pictures of everybody in compromising situations.”
Shearer’s score also refers to the novel in specific ways. Readers will recall it beginning with the sisters attending a lecture on Beethoven; Shearer quotes
the composer’s music at several points during the opera. “I’ll be interested to see who picks it up,” he says. The opera makes Jackie a failed cafe singer, so Shearer incorporated excerpts from jazz standards “as well as some jazzy stuff of my own.”
Shearer, an award-winning composer, and Stevens, who has spent much of her career as a pianist and solo performer, had an earlier Bay Area success with the opera “Middlemarch in Spring.” Adapted from George Eliot’s “Middlemarch,” it made its world premiere in San Francisco in 2015.
They spent three years writing “Howards End, America.” Along the way, scenes from the opera were previewed on West Edge Opera’s “Snapshot” series. Mary Chun, the music director of Earplay, agreed to partner with Stevens and Shearer’s RealOpera company to present the world premiere. A strong advocate for new works, Chun has made keen impressions conducting operas such as “Powder Her Face” for West Edge.
Today, Shearer says the opportunities for new operas are good. “This has been my home base since the ’60s, and things have definitely changed in that time,” he said. “There’s a lot of opera and a lot of new opera. The interesting thing is that it’s not the big commercial companies, but the small ones, who are leading the way with new operas.”
Details: 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday; Z Space, San Francisco; $30-$45; 415-6260453, www.zspace.org, www.howardsend america.com.
AN OPERA RARITY >> If you’ve never seen a production of “I Due Foscari,” you’re not alone. Verdi’s 1844 opera, based on Lord Byron’s historical tragedy “The Two Foscari,” is rarely staged in the Bay Area. But West Bay Opera has a new production running through this weekend, with two performances remaining.
Details: 8 p.m. Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday; $35$85, Lucie Stern Theatre, Palo Alto; 650-424-9999, www.wbopera.org.