Asked to describe the “girls” whose intertwined stories provide most of the opera’s California Gold Rush narrative, Sellars praised them for not “blam anybody” for their plights, but instead “tak responsibility for everything that happens.” This description is downright peculiar when applied to Ah Sing (sung by soprano Hye Jung Lee), a Chinese immigrant who was sold into prostitution at age ten by her mother and hopes to make enough money from her trade to someday buy a farm.Īt a key point in the opera, she chooses to marry one from an army of gold-obsessed miners. Sellars, an elderly, daffy, gnomish bon vivant with high hair and a gaudy shirt, gave an almost cartoonishly conservative interview before the curtain went up. So, I put on a tolerably fancy outfit and went off to the opera with bright anticipation.īut my hopes were dashed from the start. But once I realized it had really happened - and remembered how the duo’s political evenhandedness on that topic remains pretty brave today - I got my hopes up for their new work, Girls of the Golden West, now premiering at the War Memorial Auditorium in San Francisco. It was such a strange, harrowing, and under-attended screening, and I’ve never met anyone else who’d seen the film, so I finally wrote it off as a bizarre hallucination. When I read the description of The Death of Klinghoffer, I realized that I’d actually seen the 2003 film version at some film festival or other. New York’s Metropolitan Opera announced a new production of it in 2014, then buckled under public pressure and canceled a scheduled broadcast into two thousand movie theaters. To this day, opera companies are scared to stage it. In the view of many outraged critics and citizens, their evenhanded approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could only mean antisemitism and the glorification of terrorists. In 1991, their treatment of the Palestinian cause in The Death of Klinghoffer, which dramatizes the 1985 hijacking of the passenger ship the Achilli Lauro by the Palestinian Liberation Organization, got them into trouble. And their topical, contemporary handling of opera can come as a shock to those who consider it a cultural form so lofty it still seems as if top hats and diamond tiaras should be worn in order to witness it. Their previous works, Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoffer, and Doctor Atomic, have made them controversial figures at times. Composer John Adams and librettist/director Peter Sellars have made a name for themselves as the lefties of the opera world.
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