Dame Shirley), a doctor’s wife who traveled from her East Coast home to Northern California in the 1850s. Its primary source is “The Shirley Letters,” written by Louise Clappe (a.k.a. Set amid the tumult of the California Gold Rush, the work incorporates Latin American and Chinese poetry, writings by Mark Twain and Frederick Douglass, and lyrics from nineteenth-century miners’ songs.
Co-commissioned with Dallas Opera and Dutch National Opera, Girls was given a ten-performance run in San Francisco it offers a richly imagined score, a libretto drawn from historical sources, and an affectingly staged production. The latest collaboration from composer John Adams and librettist-director Peter Sellars, the opera is a work steeped in California history that speaks to the politics of today. THE MOST EAGERLY ANTICIPATED EVENT of San Francisco Opera’s fall season was the world premiere of Girls of the Golden West on November 21-and the company’s opening night performance lived up to expectations. Six weeks before my flight.Elliot Madore as Ramón and J'Nai Bridges as Josefa Segovia 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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