Opera dust-bowls through ‘Burgh

The Grapes of Wrath Benedum Center Nov. 18, 21, 23 Pittsburgh Opera Student tickets: $16 and… The Grapes of Wrath Benedum Center Nov. 18, 21, 23 Pittsburgh Opera Student tickets: $16 and $33 through Pitt Arts The power of words is undeniable. But for Ricky Ian Gordon, composer of the opera ‘The Grapes of Wrath,’ music must provide even clearer meaning than words. ‘That’s what opera should be ‘mdash; text illuminated beyond its capacity, beyond the meaning it has when it is spoken,’ he said. Being performed tonight and this weekend for Pittsburgh audiences at the Benedum Center, ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ will harness the emotive force of John Steinbeck’s best-selling novel with a score and a text that navigates the divide between musical and opera, dabbling in the blues and Appalachian music. ‘The Grapes of Wrath,’ set in the time of the Great Depression, follows the story of the Joads, an Oklahoma farming family. Driven from their land by debt and ecological breakdown, the Joads take to the road with thousands of other ‘Okies’ and head toward the promise of California, rumored to be rich with jobs and the promise of a new life. Michael Korie, the lebrettist for ‘Grapes of Wrath,” and Gordon collaborated to convert the familiar story into musical form, a gargantuan undertaking. Steinbeck’s work clocks in at 600 pages, and Gordon and Korie agreed that they did not want to cut out portions of the novel. It had been done with the film adaptations, said Korie, but the two believed it was important to make use of Steinbeck’s narrative chapters as well as his chronicle of the Joad family. ‘Steinbeck followed the Oklahoma farmers on the road and kept a journal,’ said Korie, ‘so a lot of the novel is based on fact.” But maintaining both Steinbeck’s narrative voice and the story of the Joad family required some masterful organization on Korie’s part, something he accomplished through another medium: illustration. ‘It’s a little bit like storyboarding a movie,’ said Korie of his unintentional illustrating of his libretto. ‘It tells you that it can be done. If you can visualize it and sketch it out, it can be done,’ he said. Gordon, when he first saw Korie’s manuscript for the first act, was taken aback. ‘It was so impossibly beautiful,’ he said, ‘I couldn’t believe he’d achieved that in words.’ The staging for the opening of the opera takes the audience through fields of rustling green corn, a bucolic splendor that turns dun-colored and then to dust, evoking the sorrow of the fallow earth. In an essay for the February 2007 premiere of the work by the Minnesota Opera, Gordon wrote that ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ is ‘a story about great flat distances, wide open spaces, vast silences filled with doubt, fear and hope.’ Gordon links his ability to compose the grand tragedy of the Oklahoma farmers and others like them to the death of his partner in 1987. Inconsolable with grief, a friend suggested that Gordon travel out West. ‘For the first time in my life, I was going through something so big it threatened to tear me apart, and I was suddenly in a place with enough space to encompass it,’ said Gordon. ‘It would be hard to say that I found the score for ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ there, but it was a sense of spaciousness that opened up in me that allowed the score to come through me, and I don’t know that before I knew that particular grief, a sort of spreading out that had to happen, that I could have written it.” Both Gordon and Korie are adept at incorporating change into their work, an openness that has kept them perfecting the opera through its premieres in Minnesota and Utah, and now in Pittsburgh. ‘We come to opera like theater writers,’ said Gordon, which means that the two were at every rehearsal, tweaking, shaping, reworking and rewriting. ‘We’re tinkerers, we’re always trying to make it better and get it right,’ said Gordon. For an opera, this is amazing. Most composers and librettists are very much dead ‘mdash; the performers cannot ask them, ‘What do you mean, here?” ‘I don’t consider myself an academic, I don’t just hand in an opera and then show up to the opening,’ said Korie. ‘I’m very much hands on, process oriented. The performers are the ultimate barometer of truth, so if they think something doesn’t feel right or it doesn’t work, we change it to feel real.’ And its truth as a work is linked to its continuing relevance, its ability to tug at the American psyche. ‘This book could have been written yesterday,’ said Gordon. ‘One has to ask, what did he tap into?’ ‘It’s a very American story in terms of situation and language,’ said Korie, ‘but also in terms of its truths ‘mdash; the cyclical nature of American politics and living.’ It seems only fitting that such a political work as ‘Grapes of Wrath’ would find new expression amid an economic recession, the rash of home foreclosures reviving the plight of the Joad family for many Americans. ‘It seemed intimidating to delve into an iconic work of literature,’ said Gordon, ‘but sometimes we’re vessels for bigger messages. That is, if we’re available to hear them.’