Adams recalled: “When word came out about what this opera was about, people said, ‘Well, that’s not a John Adams opera. Immediately following the opera’s performance, John Adams was presented with the San Francisco Opera Medal, the first time to a composer, by Company General Director Matthew Shilvock. This is a new American opera with a fresh, radically critical look at our history that either our current president or vice president would likely walk out on. Applause broke out when “National Endowment for the Arts” was projected. At the premiere, before the first note of the opera was heard, the supertitle panel displayed the names of the opera sponsors. Much water has flowed out of California’s Sierra Nevada since. The New York Times singled out this San Francisco Opera (SFO) premiere as “the most eagerly anticipated new opera of the season.”Ī comparable story about the intersectionality among white, Latino and native populations in California, though far less bloody in the telling, is the classic epic Ramona.Īdams began composing Girls two and a half years ago, at a time when the popular President Barack Obama could optimistically look forward to handing over the White House to his Democratic Party successor. The title recalls the 1910 “spaghetti Western” opera La Fanciulla del West by Giacomo Puccini, based on the American play The Girl of the Golden West by David Belasco, whose father was one of the original 49ers. Girls of the Golden West is set in this early, male-centric 1850s Gold Rush era, directing our attention to several women who made their mark on the new state. By 1860, adult women made up just 19 percent of the state’s population.” Yet there were very few women among them. After the Gold Rush…the population soared to 300,000 new Americans, many of them settling in boomtowns such as Downieville. According to the opera program, “In March 1848, there were fewer than 800 non-native Americans in California. acquired about half of Mexico’s territory, including California.
In the resolution of the Mexican-American War of 1846-48, the U.S. It didn’t take long before the intercultural New World kumbaya collapsed into European racial supremacism.Ī similar pattern emerged in the West. The first Thanksgiving took place in 1621, and what we call the “Indian Wars” began in 1622. 21) took place two days before Thanksgiving. SAN FRANCISCO-The world premiere of John Adams and Peter Sellars’ new opera Girls of the Golden West (seen Nov.
Left to right, Ryan McKinny as Clarence and Paul Appleby as Joe Cannon with the San Francisco Opera Chorus / Cory Weaver
0 kommentar(er)
