When composing “Harvey Milk” in the early 1990s, Stewart added Wallace to a series of much-discussed “biopic” operas based on recent history. Philip Glass’s ‘Satyagraha’ on Gandhi; Anthony Davis’ “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X”; and John Adams’ “Nixon in China” was still fresh on people’s ears.
But by telling the story of the gay activist and politician who was murdered in 1978 by a fellow member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Wallace turned things around. Gay men, long a fervent segment of the operatic audience, had rarely, if ever, been the subject of an opera.
When “Harvey Milk” premiered in Houston in 1995, Edward Rothstein’s DailyExpertNews review called it “a heady combination of banality and effective drama, attitude, playfulness and polemic.” Before it went to San Francisco the following year, Wallace and the librettist, Michael Korie, made some changes, added arias for the title character, tweaked some orchestrations, and took the whole thing apart.
But the work remained vast – in its length and its dozens of small characters. “It’s this monster piece,” Wallace said in a recent phone interview. “But we were young and ambitious and hungry, and we did what we wanted to do.”
However, attracting a monster is difficult. The work has barely been performed in the more than 25 years since its premiere, but the opportunity for a fresh hearing motivated Wallace to undertake an even more drastic overhaul. His new version, designed for the San Francisco company Opera Parallèle but delayed by the pandemic, will premiere June 11 at the St. Louis Opera Theater.
“I literally started on a blank page from measure one,” Wallace said in the interview. “So there is no bar that is the same, even if it is absolutely the same opera.”
Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.
How did this new version come about?
A long time ago I called David Gockley [who commissioned the work at Houston Grand Opera and led San Francisco Opera from 2006-16] with my idea for visionary Italian director Romeo Castellucci to direct a revised edition of ‘Harvey Milk’. Just to see it from a completely different angle.
But David said that if we wanted to do it quickly, we should go to Opera Parallèle. And so I went to them, and we decided to do it. They called me up and said, “What about all those smaller roles? Would you like to check them out?” I said sure, and the next day I called them and said, “They’re all gone.”
It had the benefit of removing weeds and focusing on the story and spirit of the play. When we wrote it, we were concerned that people didn’t know who Harvey Milk was — not much anyway. So I took it as an obligation to teach, which can be a bit anti-art. So there are things in it that are no longer needed. We now have what we originally hoped for, which is a sort of mythical interpretation of his life and his evolution into an activist.
Obviously, Gus Van Sant’s 2008 film “Milk” exposed the story to a lot more people.
Gus actually came to ‘Harvey Milk’ in San Francisco, and he borrowed a few things from us, like ‘Tosca’. It was in there because the night before Harvey Milk was killed, he went to the San Francisco Opera, and what was being performed? “Toska.” It was something very literal. But we made the opera a place of pilgrimage and revelation for him. So that and some of the other things we did are in the movie.
What exactly has changed about the opera?
I started looking at it with all those years of experience in between – I wasn’t trying to make it more sophisticated or sophisticated, just thinking about how to deploy the resources, and not wasting time. I think the music playing time is now an hour and 50 minutes, and it was an evening of almost three hours when we first did it. At San Francisco Opera there were about 80 or 85 players, and in St. Louis there will be about 66; and at Opera Parallèle, about 31. It can now be done by small or large companies.
The music is now freer and more organic, yet fully recognizable as what we wrote. The bones are the same, but the flesh is different; it’s sleeker and smoother and more direct, with more rhythmic clarity. There is nothing to distract you from the thrust of the story and the music.
What I wanted to do was not rewrite it from the point of view of what I would do now; I wanted to fulfill what my purpose was then. For example, when the young Harvey goes to Central Park – he follows this man he’s going to have sex with, and there’s sex all around him – the music has always been driven by this very aggressive figure, who’s going wild. Originally I won’t say I sharpened it, but I made it more elegant than it should have been, and more complicated too. And now it’s just this thing hammering at you, and it’s much more effective. So in a way it’s rawer now than I had the confidence back then.
Was it satisfying to return to something you did so long ago?
I had a traumatic brain injury in 2010. I was on a bicycle, and then I woke up in an ambulance and had no idea how I got there. I couldn’t write music for about five years, something I’ve been doing since I was a kid. So it was devastating.
I’ve tried a lot of things to improve it, and the doctors were completely useless. I had to start these experiments on myself. So when we got the chance to do “Harvey Milk” again, and it was clear I was going to rewrite the entire opera, I wasn’t sure I could do it.
When you write music, it’s like a bag of memories from the time you wrote it; it’s like a diary, but it’s abstract. And I hoped that if I dived into this piece again—I was in my thirties then and I’m turning 62 this year—I could find those memories that would completely re-ignite my compositional life. And the experiment worked. I’ve been on fire. I think I’m doing the best work I’ve ever done. So it’s very important to me, this moment. It’s not just about breathing new life into opera.