10 at the War Memorial Opera House details here. Discussing contemporary politics by assaulting a major American myth is by now par for the course for Adams: he.
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And what comes through is something incredibly genuine.” The opera is close to Adams heart in more ways than one - he's had a cabin for years near Downieville in the Sierra foothills. This is the place that John Adamsquite likely America’s preeminent living composerhas chosen to set his fifth and latest opera, Girls of the Golden West, which I recently saw in its world premiere at the San Francisco Opera. Last Tuesday I was at the War Memorial Opera House for San Francisco Operas world premiere of Girls of the Golden West, a new work set during the California gold rush in the Sierra Nevada in 1851.The music is by John Adams and the staging and libretto by Peter Sellars. "And there’s a wonderful sense of humanity, the ability to laugh at oneself. Sellars has plucked the libretto, as he often does, from historical documents, this time from letters and personal accounts from the period. “What people are actually singing are the words of the people who sang them," Adams told me by phone. Montez, toured California gold country and settled for a time in Nevada City, A model for ‘Girls of the Golden West’ by David Gropman (Photo:Scott Wall/SF Opera) The opera features scandal magnet Lola Montez doing her famous spider dance to Adams music. 9 of 15 10 of 15 A set in the world premiere of 'Girls of the Golden West' by John Adams and Peter Sellars.
GIRLS OF THE GOLDEN WEST ADAMS SCRIBD FREE
As Adams told me, it's set in a mining camp, a real place called Rich Bar, and the town of Downieville, with a focus on the voices we rarely hear from gold rush days: the wife of a doctor in a mining camp ( Dame Shirley), a Hispanic dance hall owner, a Chinese prostitute, a free black wagon driver. Girls of the Golden West is by Berkeley composer John Adams and librettist Peter Sellars - it's their fourth historical opera, the most recent being Doctor Atomic, which also premiered in San Francisco. It is revisionist or, rather, corrective American history, a tale of men turning feral as they swarmed California like an invasive species.
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This may be the classical event of the year for the Bay Area: the world premiere of a new opera about the California gold rush. Girls is an outright rejection of the romantic West of Puccini, of the hubris of Manifest Destiny, of all the rosy myths you’ve heard about the Golden State. Next February 12 and 14 Opera Omaha will stage Puccini’s real spaghetti western The Girl of the Golden West aka La Fanciulla del West.