SACCO AND VANZETTI is an opera about young men - in their 30s - whose persecution by older men (like Judge Webster Thayer and antisemitic Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell) and sympathetic support by older women (especially Elizabeth Glendower Evans) inspired the 27-year-old American Jewish composer Marc Blitzstein (1905-64) to create THE CONDEMNED, a never-produced choral opera.
Meanwhile, he had three very notable successes: THE CRADLE WILL ROCK (1936), REGINA (1949), and his adaptation/translation of THREEPENNY OPERA (1954).
In 1959, the Ford Foundation commissioned an opera from him, optioned by the Met, and he returned to the subject, saying this would be his "magnum opus," working on it in Westport, Rome and Haifa - remarking that his Jewishness gave him a rich perspective on the issues of prejudice that permeated the trial, and the opera. In late 1963, he left the score in his car trunk in New Rochelle while off on a working vacation in Martinique, where he was mugged, beaten, and misdiagnosed, dying of his wounds in the hospital in January 1964.
He'd been working there on TALES OF MALAMUD, a group of one-act operas based on Bernard Malamud stories. Leonard Bernstein said he would finish the first one, IDIOTS FIRST, but in 1970 turned it over to me. (I was 21.) The 1978 NY City premiere, which I conducted while working as Assistant Chorus Master at the Met, received unanimous raves - including Morris Schappes', in Jewish Currents, winning the Off-Broadway Opera Award for "most important event of the season."
That year I started thinking seriously about finishing SACCO, and finally did so in 2001. Blitzstein champion, mezzo-soprano Brenda Lewis got us the first production - concertante, with piano and a cast of 12, at the White Barn Theatre, co-sponsored by the After Dinner Opera Company (founded by 22-year-old Richard Flusser in 1949) in Westport Aug. 17-19, 2001. All the reviews of those who attended were positive.
But then came 9/11, and no one wanted to produce an opera with anarchists as protagonists and law enforcement as villains - until the immigration crisis brought on by our xenophobic past president. Then Hofstra's Italian American Festival scheduled it, only to have COVID cancel the entire Festival, in 2020, 2021, and 2022. And then the brilliant young director Benjamin Spierman found us the Studio Theatre at Lehman College, from which he had just graduated, and where the After Dinner Opera Company presented the staged orchestral premiere Sept. 10 & 11, 2022. It was his 125th production - the first having been my 1992 NEW WORLD: An Opera About What Columbus Did to the "Indians," a collaboration with Joel Shatzky, whom I'd met through Jewish Currents, commissioned by The Puffin Foundation, whom I'd also met through Jewish Currents!
Ben's Mom, Helene Williams, had been in the 2001 SACCO - in fact she'd been a "midwife" to it, singing all the female roles, and some male ones, at backers auditions and excerpt concerts over the years. She also married me, July 14, 2002, at Stephen Wise Free Synagogue, and sang with me there in the song I'd written about Sacco's and Vanzetti's hometowns of Torremaggiore and Villafalletto during our 2000 trip there to visit their graves and families, to the tune of Blitzstein's gorgeous song "Hills of Amalfi," as we were passing the beautiful Amalfi Coast on the train.
That Trio is a musically dramatic high point of the score, and Ben & I decided to follow it with an intermission, performing the 3-act work in 2 acts, as is often done with operas like REGINA, WOZZECK, and my own HANNAH. A video capturing the best of the two performances, welded together, subtitled, with a cast of 20 (including Helene!) and a 27-piece orchestra I conducted, will be shown to an international audience (including folks from Torremaggiore!) via Zoom on Sunday, Oct. 30 at 1-5 pm.
For an invitation please write to courtstreetmusicvalleystream@gmail.com
For more information:
https://www.soundwordsight.com/2022/08/the-winding-road-to-sacco-and-vanzetti-by-leonard-lehrman/
and http://ljlehrman.artists-in-residence.com/SaccoAndVanzetti.html
Leonard J. Lehrman
Is the Oct. 30 zoom going to be recorded. Those of us who have to be on the road at just that time are hoping the answer is yes!