Bleak images of the 1930s Dust Bowl that ravaged the southern plains of the country live always in our collective American mind. Photos of massive dust clouds bearing down on lonely farmsteads haunt the collective imagination, along with photos of Model A Fords completely buried in dust, and sepia-toned pictures of tired, beaten people. Images of the Dust Bowl also inevitably invoke the sad tale of the unfortunate Joad family from The Grapes of Wrath,, the novel written by one of America’s best known and widely acclaimed authors, John Steinbeck.
A native of Salinas, Calif., Steinbeck had already experienced a modicum of literary success with his book Of Mice and Men when in 1936 the San Francisco News, commissioned him to write a series of articles on the desperate plight of migrant farm workers. Steinbeck became so immersed in their sufferings that for two years he actually lived in a migrant camp, where he witnessed rampant disease and abject poverty. After this long, grim period, Steinbeck finally sat down to write, and finished The Grapes of Wrath in less than 100 days.
It is an epic, and a classic American story. Published in 1939, The Grapes of Wrath portrays a time in American history when huge dust storms, some lasting as long as three days, ravaged the over-farmed, overburdened soils of Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, and eastern Colorado. For a decade, crops withered in the fields, and dust seeped through walls of houses and piled up against front doors, requiring shoveling. The lungs of people and animals filled with black dust. Some came down with dust-induced “black pneumonia”; some went mad. The downtrodden victims endured starvation and financial ruin—banks and corporate landlords offered no mercy.
This brutal cataclysm caused numerous tragedies, such as those described in The Grapes of Wrath. With hope and a fair amount of naiveté, the Joad family began their exodus toward a new life in California, only to discover they had been duped along the way. Some 70,000 migrants just like them are camped in the San Joaquin Valley with very little work, and the Joads are forced to live in horrific, disease-riddled Hooverville. More and more misfortune befalls them. Like the biblical figure of Job, one plague after another visits the Joads—starvation, death, murder, and more.
Along with Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, The Grapes of Wrath was the publishing event of the decade. The novel sold half a million copies, and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1940. Steinbeck later won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. It is required reading in most high school and college literature courses, and most Americans know the story. Suspicion about Steinbeck’s possible communist leanings, and an unsettling ending that some perceived as vulgar, meant the book created instant controversy and was banned and burned in New York, Illinois, and even Kern County, Calif., where the story takes place. One year after the book was published, John Ford filmed the movie, starring Henry Fonda as Tom Joad. The Grapes of Wrath has lived as a novel, a movie, and in the last few years, even an acclaimed stage dramatization at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company.
And now, it is an opera.
Minnesota Opera’s The Grapes of Wrath, co-commissioned with the Utah Symphony and Opera, will receive its world premiere Feb. 13 in St. Paul, Minn. at the Ordway Center for the Performing Arts. New York City-based Ricky Ian Gordon composed the ambitious new work, with libretto by Michael Korie of Harvey Milk fame. Britain’s Opera Now describes the opera as one of the 2007 season’s high profile events.
Gordon’s music draws from all vocal genres: classical art song, musical theatre, and jazz, as well as opera. Some consider him an heir to the musical legacy of Stephen Sondheim. A prolific composer known for the extreme lyrical quality of his music, Gordon’s impressive body of work includes the 2001 CD Bright Eyed Joy. Renée Fleming, Dawn Upshaw, and sensational theatrical diva Audra McDonald, among others, have performed his songs.
Seattle-born mezzo-soprano Deanne Meek and San Francisco-based lyric baritone Brian Leerhuber, who play Ma and Tom Joad respectively, talked with CS about the opera, the composer, and what it is like to sing Gordon’s music. They described some challenges, such as how to scale down such a huge epic to one evening. (Apparently, at one point a kind of American “Ring Cycle” was in the offing, until wiser heads prevailed.)
Leerhuber describes Gordon as a “demanding taskmaster.”
“Vocal ranges are extreme for everyone,” he adds. “My entrance aria alone employs a full two octaves, and that’s just the beginning!”
At the time of this writing, orchestration is not complete, but Leerhuber describes what he’s heard so far as “Verdi on steroids!” Reportedly, the singers are already taking the score to their voice teachers to learn how to sing the flat and swallowed vowel sounds of the Dust Bowl victims.
Meek, who is singing Ma Joad, discusses another challenge. “In a story such as this, known and loved by millions, the challenge to make every word and idea understood will be particularly great.” Another challenge—how to deal with the very dark, sad story without turning off the audience. Interestingly, to a person, performers and principals we interviewed pointed out that a strong current of hope runs through the story. “We used humor, romance and irony,” says Librettist Korie.
Many in the music world rave about Gordon’s compositions. One champion of his music is pianist and vocal teacher Val Underwood, who brings Gordon to his Hawaii Performing Arts Festival to coach young singers in the interpretation of his songs. “Gordon is truly a composer for the voice,” Underwood says. “He writes beautiful melodies that deeply communicate the text. Plus, his musical lines are gratifying to the voice, unlike many contemporary composers, who persist in putting singers through meaningless vocal gymnastics.”
Minnesota Artistic Director Dale Johnson exclaims, “He is unafraid to be romantic, emotional, direct, and powerful.” Tenor Leerhuber adds, “It is wonderful to be singing a new opera which is song-based, with tunes that move you so powerfully. There will be a few tunes that people will be whistling as they leave the theater, such as ‘The Plenty Road’ from Act 1, ‘Truck Drivers’ from Act 2—as well as ‘Ma Joad’s Lullaby’— and from Act 3, ‘I’ll Be There.’”
Broadway sensation Audra McDonald, who performed several Gordon songs on her 1998 CD Way Back to Paradise, describes his music as “all at once beautiful, haunting, melodious, dissonant, heartbreaking, brutally honest, and unabashedly optimistic. And while his music is not always easy to sing, it is always a deeply fulfilling experience.” Stephen Holden in the New York Times said, “If the music of Ricky Ian Gordon had to be defined by a single quality, it would be the bursting effervescence infusing songs that blithely blur the lines between art song and the high-end Broadway music of Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim . . . It’s caviar for a world gorging on pizza.”
We asked Gordon to describe why the production chose Leerhuber to play Tom Joad. “Brian, aside from having one of the most beautiful, rich baritone voices around, has an intensity and emotionalism as well as strength,” said Gordon, . . . “[he] creates a tension and a complexity that seemed right for the role . . . and he looks good in a hat!” As for Meek, Gordon raves, “Deanne has one of those clear instruments that feels like overstuffed velvet furniture . . . you just want to fall into her sound. Physically, Deanne is a farm girl with a wide-open, beautiful, wind-swept face and a strong body that makes the notion of working the land believable.”
Befitting such an epic, this opera is big, with three acts, a cast of 50, and extensive staging, plus choreography by Doug Varone and choral music conducted by Grant Gershon of the Los Angeles Master Chorale. Academy Award winner Eric Simonson directs. The creators crafted the opera with the intent of producing the most realistic, authentic interpretation of Steinbeck possible. Librettist Korie describes hours of linguistic and dialect research to deliver the most authentic text. “We wanted the real ‘Grapes of Wrath,’ not something constructed,” he said.
The Grapes of Wrath is sure to have a powerful impact on the audience. “This opera is not reverential. . . . I want people to be shaken!” exclaims Korie. The creative team is committed to upholding the Steinbeck tradition of outrage at social injustice.
“We are sadly in need of operas that speak to us as a people right now . . . like Mozart and Verdi spoke directly to the audience of the time,” says Minnesota Artistic Director Johnson. “. . . As in the 1930s, there is mass migration, displacement of whole populations and the sense that ‘big business’ does not value the workers that have made it a success.” Depictions of disenfranchisement, hopelessness, and homelessness, coupled with corporate indifference from 70 years ago, ring all too true in today’s world. “Not since the Dust Bowl have there been so many refugees in this country,” adds Gordon. “. . . The last scene, when the Joads are in the rain looking for a dry place—could it be more timely? It’s hair-raising.”
If You Go:
The Grapes of Wrath will be performed Feb. 10, 13, 15, 17, and 18, at the Ordway Center for the Performing Arts, St. Paul, Minn., in English with projected English captions. For more information, contact Minnesota Opera, www.mnopera.org or 612-333-2700.
Utah Opera performances of The Grapes of Wrath are set for May 12, 14, 16, 18, and 20 at the Capitol Theatre, 50 West 200 South, Salt Lake City, Utah, in English with English supertitles. Contact Utah Opera at 801-355-ARTS or www.utahopera.org.
The Grapes of Wrath will be performed in Houston and Pittsburgh in 2008.
