A Story That Sings

The journey to this world premiere began in 1998. “I reread the book,” says Johnson. “I don’t know why. It seemed operatic. I was setting up a training program at the Berkshire Opera Festival and sharing a house with [director] Eric Simonson. I was thinking of lots of other ideas—an Isabel Allende story, Stephen King’s Dolores Claiborne, that Tobias Picker is now doing—but I kept coming back to Grapes of Wrath. Eric had performed in a stage version of it at Steppenwolf in Chicago”—the production eventually went to Broadway—“and he convinced me that it could sing.” Simonson quickly became the clear choice as the opera’s director.

“We were looking for something that had contemporary resonance,” Smith says. “The element of displacement echoes the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. And the book’s story of the deterioration of the middle class is certainly relevant to this world of outsourcing and diminishing access to health insurance.”

Thinking of the work in musical terms, says Johnson, “it seems inspired by Verdi. Like Aida, it has an epic quality with a personal component. There’s a national event told through the eyes of a few people.”

It wasn’t until Johnson and Smith agreed on the novel that the discussion turned to finding a composer. Most of the candidates were music-theater composers, rather than strictly opera composers. “What was especially important was addressing the audience’s expectations,” Smith says. “We wanted an American sound, something quintessentially American.”

“Ma Joad singing in an atonal European style would not be believed,” Johnson says. “We wanted a ‘numbers opera’ with connecting recitative, but wanted the audience to feel like they’d heard it before, continuing along the same line as Porgy and Bess and Showboat. We were looking for a crossover composer.”

Ricky Ian Gordon, a rising star in New York’s music-theater world, seemed the right fit. In 2005, he won an Obie Award for Orpheus and Eurydice: a song cycle in two acts, a genre-straddling piece performed off-Broadway. He’s known particularly for his songs, which have been recorded by the likes of Renée Fleming and Deborah Voigt on the classical end of the music spectrum and Audra McDonald and Betty Buckley on the pop end. “When I was growing up,” says Gordon, “nobody talked to me about the difference between classical music and pop. I was obsessed with Porgy and Bess and West Side Story, and Blitzstein’s Regina and the operas of Menotti, and Neil Young and The Beatles. I loved Joni Mitchell enough to correspond with her.”

Much is made these days of how classical music has become more tonal, eschewing the twelve-tone dissonance and overly academic writing that dominated the latter part of the twentieth century. But listening to Gordon play through his score points out what is still missing from much contemporary work. Tonal does not necessarily mean melodic. This man knows how to write great tunes. He then weds them to rich orchestrations, creating what he calls “internal complexity.”

“It was a no-brainer with Ricky,” Johnson says. “We knew him most from his prolific collection of songs. He sings with an American voice. He exudes energy and power and optimism.” But even more than that, says Johnson, “he moves the compositional world into the twenty-first century, embracing rock and pop. His music has heart, and he is unafraid to be emotional, which will help the audience find its way into the dark story.”

When it came to selecting a librettist, however, Gordon, Johnson, and Smith weren’t on the same page initially. Gordon had suggested Michael Korie, but, says Johnson, “Kevin and I didn’t think he was right. He had a great body of work, but it had an edgy, contemporary quality. We wanted the story to speak for itself.”

“But he came up with a scenario that was very moving,” Smith says.