On April 17 at Carnegie Hall, MasterVoices will present a revised concert version of The Grapes of Wrath, the opera by composer Ricky Ian Gordon and librettist Michael Korie based on John Steinbeck’s novel. The story is set during the Great Depression of the 1930s, and recounts the plight of the Joad family, Oklahoma sharecroppers who, as thousands of others, become refugees in their own country. Forced off their land and lured by the promise of available work, they migrate to California, enduring loss, hardship, hatred, and violence. The opera premiered at Minnesota Opera in 2007 and had its New York City premiere by MasterVoices in 2010, being the first work that Ted Sperling brought to the group. This revival is presented as part of Mr. Sperling’s tenth-season anniversary as Artistic Director with MasterVoices and features new revisions and music exclusive to this performance. Sperling will conduct the 120-member MasterVoices chorus, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, and an all-star cast. Two distinguished actors, Emmy-nominee (Succession) J. Smith-Cameron and Emmy Award-winner (Scandal) Joe Morton will co-narrate.
Ricky Ian Gordon (Photo: Fay Fox)
Acclaimed prolific composer Ricky Ian Gordon has written music that spans art song, opera, and musical theater. His works have been performed and recorded by numerous internationally renowned singers, and recent productions of his operas include The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (New York City Opera/Yiddish Folksbiene; libretto by Michael Korie) and Intimate Apparel (Metropolitan Opera/Lincoln Center Theater; libretto by Lynn Nottage), among many others. I am grateful to Mr. Gordon for taking the time to answer some questions about The Grapes of Wrath.
For additional information about Ricky Ian Gordon, the April 19th performance, and MasterVoices, please click on the links at the end of this interview.
While the story reflects being forced to become refugees in one’s own country, immigrants escaping oppression and scarcity can also relate to the Joads’ pain and struggle. The themes of migration—and immigration—in search of a better life are timeless and universal. What does it mean to you to illuminate these themes, especially at this time?
To set a story like The Grapes of Wrath to music is a painful privilege. It is tragic that this harrowing and deeply human story never loses its resonance because of man’s eternal and ever-continuing inhumanity to man, but, since it is one’s job as an artist to try and speak to the times one lives in, that obligation can be fulfilled by entering one of the most magnificent novels ever written and addressing all of it, every disastrous detail of this truly fragile existence.
I was an immigrant child to this country, and later I realized that I was never taught in school about this period of enforced migration in American history. It was through the book, the film, and your opera that I discovered what happened. Why do you think this terrible period isn’t usually discussed in history classes?
I think that, in the same way, German children reported, post World War II there was a reluctance to teach about the Holocaust in the schools because it would hurt the national identity, the national pride, and therefore, a whole generation of artists and filmmakers—Anselm Kiefer, Rainer Werner Fassbinder included—started making art about the unspoken, the quiet, hidden national shame. And in the way there is a movement in the Republican Party agenda to eliminate the necessary discussion of slavery and racial discrimination, the real story of the Native Americans, in order to buoy national pride and avoid any kind of collective guilt: there has been a kind of unspoken burying of America’s neglect for its poor, its marginalized, and America’s ability to pass the buck and not confront head on the way the economic machine pulverizes everything in its path, making the poor, poorer, and the rich, richer. In essence, it boils down to, let’s only teach and learn what makes us feel good about ourselves.
The Grapes of Wrath (Artwork by Owen Gent)
That’s why we need artists and writers like John Steinbeck, whose influence was monumental. When the great Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa made his masterpiece, Ikiru, there is a sequence in which mothers are trying to get the local government to do something about a festering pond full of stinking poisonous water in the middle of their small village. The way Kurosawa created the scene, the way the mothers are sent from one office to another, with virtually no one taking responsibility for their forthright plight, is straight out of Steinbeck. Even when Don Katz wrote his monumental book about my family, Home Fires, in 1992, he based the structure on The Grapes of Wrath, in the way every other chapter is about my family, while the interstitial chapters are about postwar America and the climate we grew up in. Steinbeck, in essence, though writing a novel, wrote a social history of America in the ‘30s. [Home Fires: An Intimate Portrait of One Middle-Class Family by Donald Katz is the powerful real-life saga of the Gordon family spanning nearly five decades, from the end of World War II to the early 1990s.]
I understand that you’ve added a new scene, “People Again”, that portrays a welcome relief in the Joads’ harrowing journey as they settle in the government camp. What was important for you to convey in this scene?
That, along the way, there was hope, there was joy, because the people, even in the gravest situations, knew how to help and amuse themselves, even if no one else cared to help or amuse them. Steinbeck did not write a book about dour human beings in a dour situation, he wrote a book about magnificent, funny, and deeply human beings in a dour situation. And his genius was suffusing even the darkest situations with light through the damp slats of life…the milk of kindness.
Ma is an extraordinary character, such a force of nature and love! What was essential for you to express musically about her?
I grew up at a time, post-war America, when the rule seemed to be that households were ruled by men, blustery, violent, arrogant, disappointed, overly pressured and put-upon men, but I had three sisters, brilliant, mercurial, actively feminist, and a mother who had a private revolt brewing inside her at all times…so in my world, women ruled covertly, without the men knowing. So, I love the whole creation of Ma, whose only hope is to hold her fracturing splintered family together as, one by one, they slowly slip through her fingers; for me, Ma is the heart of Steinbeck’s book, and the heart of our opera. Her equivalent is Erda in Wagner’s Ring. Ma is the soil, the water, the air from which everything and everyone grows, and sadly, dies, or leaves.
Did John Ford’s film version of “The Grapes of Wrath” inspire you in any way?
The short answer is no. For me, the film, though great, and a masterpiece for the time in which it was made, leaves out the most powerful apotheosis ever put into words: the ending of Steinbeck’s great novel, the Pietà, the only hope the poor have—each other—the, again, milk of kindness. In the film, it just feels to be like they go on their merry way. I think of the incredible ending of Satyajit Rae’s great film Pather Panchali, the first in his sublime “Apu Trilogy,” when the family that has lost everything, get on the road, riding toward their uncertain future with a look of total decimation on their faces, and I think Rae was braver than Ford in portraying what those people really felt, in their exodus.
The Grapes of Wrath banner with the cast (Artwork by Owen Gent)
What do you hope that the audience will take away from this performance?
All one can hope for is that an audience is moved, that that they feel a sense of communion with their fellow human beings, that they feel more empathy and compassion, that they are even propelled into any action toward making the world a lighter place, and are perhaps, a little grateful to the artists who spent years alone in their room creating this beauty, and the artists on stage channeling it through their own vehicles.
Top: The Grapes of Wrath 2010 MasterVoices performance – Photo: Erin Baiano
The Grapes of Wrath info and tickets – April 17 at 7:30 PM, Carnegie Hall
