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.
#Reviews opera girls of the golden west free#
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. 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. “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 Six weeks before my flight.John Adams' new Gold Rush epic set to debut at SF Opera Close Menu It’s not a work of contemporary politics like the pieces that made his name in the 1980s and 90s, but one set amidst the get-rich-quick scramble of the Californian Gold Rush. Now, in his 70th-birthday year, the composer who has described his translation from New Hampshire to California back in 1971 as “numinous”, has written an opera set just down the road from his airy retreat. It’s a terrain intimately familiar to John Adams who for 40 years has enjoyed the solitude of a cabin perched 6,000 feet up in the Sierra Buttes as well as hiking the local trails with family and pointer dogs. Closer to the ocean, the round-topped, lower-lying mountains flanked by majestic Californian greenery flash yellow in the sunlight offering the incoming visitor an delightfully literal welcome to ‘The Golden West’. Gazing out of the window on a mild morning in late Fall, valleys cut with the blue ribbons of rivers recall those epic 19th-century Bierstadt oil paintings. The snow-capped peaks stretch as far as the eye can see as my plane swings low over the high Sierra Nevada before heading for the azure waters of the Pacific.
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