The opera is filled with local color, dramatic excitement - but also some of the powerful and challenging aspects of a society being born out of a competitive atmosphere.”Īdams, who has explored 20th-century history in earlier operas - “Nixon in China,” “The Death of Klinghoffer” and “Doctor Atomic,” all of which have been presented at San Francisco Opera - spent months researching 19th-century music, poring through Library of Congress archives and uncovering troves of miners’ songs. “You see this thrust of humanity coming together, which John and Peter have captured quite beautifully. “It really resonates with the city and the tremendous flux of the moment - the story of people gravitating from around the world into this relatively small area, eager to make a quick fortune. “This is our story, the story of the creation of modern-day Northern California,” Shilvock noted. If the opera captures the Gold Rush era, San Francisco Opera general director Matthew Shilvock believes it also finds parallels in our own - the tech booms and real estate bubbles still luring people to the Golden State. As the piece goes on, everything strips away to her most pure response.” That’s reflected in John’s music, which opens in this light, quirky way. At the start, it’s colorful and descriptive as you go on, the gravity starts to hit her. From the first few sentences, you catch how perceptive she is. Soprano Julia Bullock, who sings the role of Dame Shirley, says “The Shirley Letters” was a revelation: “This woman provided some of the most complete first-hand accounts of the camps during that time. But the emphasis is on characters who didn’t make it into the history books: freed and escaped slaves, Chilean miners, Chinese immigrants, women.
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Sellars has augmented his libretto with historic writings by Frederick Douglass and Mark Twain Lola Montez makes an appearance. “The reality was way more interesting than the fiction,” he said. The opera’s title is a sly reference to Puccini’s 1910 “Girl of the Golden West,” but Sellars says the resemblance ends there. Indeed, Clappe’s letters tell an unvarnished tale punctuated by episodes of hardship, prejudice, shocking violence and environmental destruction. “For a woman to survive under those conditions, a winter in the Sierra where the snow would go up to 12 feet deep - at one point, she says all they had for months on end was onions and potatoes.” “It was her wit, her ability to size up blowhards, her compassion, her extraordinary toughness,” he says. It was Sellars who recommended “The Shirley Letters” to the composer, and Adams says the book unlocked the story for him. Get it from the Apple app store or the Google Play store.
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Reading this on your phone? Stay up to date with our free mobile app. To read deeply about these events and the people who didn’t make it into the history books - the women, the Californios, the Mexicans, the Native Americans - was fascinating.” “But I really didn’t know about the Gold Rush any more than your average Californian did. “Part of the delight of this was that I know the area where these events take place,” Adams remarked in a recent interview. Her 23 letters, written to her sister back home and later published as “The Shirley Letters,” offered a revealing glimpse into Gold Rush life.
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The new work’s primary source was Louise Clappe - aka Dame Shirley - a doctor’s wife who came to California from Boston in 1851. Librettist Peter Sellars, left, urged his friend and frequent collaborator, composer John Adams, to read the “The Shirley Letters,” and the two wound up adapting the Gold Rush memoir into a new opera. Jacklyn Meduga/San Francisco Operaīut the opera, with a libretto by Adams’ longtime collaborator Peter Sellars, also portrays the darker realities of an era often reduced to a rollicking, rags-to-riches folk tale. Conducted by Grant Gershon, it’s the culminating event of Adams’ 70th birthday year.
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“Girls” tells the story of the Gold Rush, which began when a carpenter saw the first glint of metal in a nearby river, and thousands of fortune hunters descended on the region, desperate to claim some of its riches for their own.įor Adams, the Gold Country’s natural beauties were an inspiration for the work, which makes its world premiere in a San Francisco Opera production Nov. It was a good place to be, since the events of the opera take place close to his mountain getaway. That’s where he goes to compose, and it’s where he wrote much of his new opera, “Girls of the Golden West.” John Adams has lived in Berkeley since the 1970s, but in recent years, he’s spent long stretches of time in a cabin in California’s Gold Country. Politically charged ‘Dreamer’ oratorio coming to BerkeleyĢ5 years later, SF’s Del Sol Quartet still championing new ‘craft music’ ‘Girls of the Golden West’: Catch these related events
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John Adams' new Gold Rush epic set to debut at SF Opera Close Menu