It’s been 10 years since the horrific events of September 11, 2001. But composer Chris Theofanidis remembers them in vivid detail. He was in New York, headed for Penn Station to catch a train down to Baltimore for his teaching job at the Peabody Conservatory, when he heard the first report.
“They were saying the subways on the West Side were shut down, that a commuter plane had flown into one of the towers,” he recalls.
Theofanidis got on a bus, which unexpectedly stopped at Times Square. “Everybody was speculating about what it could be,” he says. “But there on the big screens in Times Square were images of what was going on in Lower Manhattan. And right behind the screens, you could see the actual smoke and an amazing number of people walking north on Broadway.”
He spent the rest of the day walking home to his East Side apartment, and, like many Americans, watching images of the attacks on the World Trade Center repeat endlessly on TV.
“It’s a remarkable story. The circumstances of his last day, and the way he behaved in the middle of total chaos is something you would hope for yourself.” — Christopher Theofanidis
Two days later, Theofanidis went to Ground Zero. “There was just this milky white air, and paper everywhere,” he says. “It was like it had snowed paper.”
That memory became a central image in Theofanidis’s new opera, Heart of a Soldier. Based on James B. Stewart’s book about 9/11 hero Rick Rescorla, the evening-length work is composed by Theofanidis to a libretto by Donna DiNovelli. Directed by Francesca Zambello, conducted by Patrick Summers, and starring baritone Thomas Hampson, the opera makes its world premiere in a San Francisco Opera production Sept. 10 at the War Memorial Opera House. Repeat performances continue through Sept. 30.
A Heroic Life
Today, the world knows what happened in New York in 2001. For many, though, Rescorla is still an unsung hero. In a recent break from rehearsals, Theofanidis said his goal was to illuminate the life of thisextraordinary American.
“It’s a remarkable story,” says the composer. “The circumstances of his last day, and the way he behaved in the middle of total chaos is something you would hope for yourself.”
The opera spans Rescorla’s life, beginning with his childhood during World War II in Cornwall, England, where he meets American soldiers on the eve of D-Day. Subsequent scenes depict him as a soldier in war-torn Rhodesia and a platoon leader in the Vietnam War. The story ends in New York, where Rescorla marries and starts a new career as head of security for Morgan Stanley. In his selfless final act, he rescues 2,700 employees — literally singing them out of the World Trade Center’s South Tower — before losing his own life as the building collapses.
In addition to Rescorla, the opera’s principal characters are Rick’s wife, Susan Rescorla, and his best friend, Daniel J. Hill. With Hampson in the central role of Rick, the cast also includes soprano Melody Moore as Susan and tenor William Burden as Hill.
Although San Francisco Opera general director David Gockley announced plans for the opera last year, Heart of a Soldier has been in the works since 2003; it was Gockley, Theofanidis explained, who gave him a copy of Stewart’s book. (Zambello suggested it to Gockley as a possible opera project.) Reading it, the composer says he was struck by its operatic themes of love, death, duty and honor.
“It’s the arc of their lives,” says Theofanidis. “These are fundamentally very modest people who really rose to the occasion. There’s something great about that, and the idea of bringing their story to the stage just became increasingly compelling to me.”
Unusual Operatic Love Stories
If the opera is dramatic, it’s also a great love story. Rick and Susan married relatively late in life, and their devotion to one another is an essential — and rather unconventional — element in the opera. (At the S.F. Opera’s press conference last December, director Zambello wryly noted that in the opera world, “except for Erda and Wotan,” we rarely see older people falling in love.)
With its epic shifts in time and locale, Theofanidis had the opportunity to compose on a large scale. Commissioned by San Francisco Opera, Heart of a Soldier is the composer’s first professional, fully staged opera (a second, Siddhartha, is slated for premiere in 2014 at Houston Grand Opera).
Written for traditional orchestra and chorus, the score evokes Cornish hymns and 1960s rock tunes; the Vietnam scenes feature instruments including electric guitar and synthesizer. Yet Theofanidis says the opera’s sound world is grounded in the Italian verismo style.
“It’s highly charged, emotional music,” he says. “It’s basically coming from a Romantic vocabulary. It’s melodic, tonal when it needs to be, kind of crunchy when it needs to be. It’s a flexible kind of Romantic language.”
The opera contains specific motifs related to Rick’s experiences. “Donna and I tried to frame the opera in terms of certain questions,” Theofanidis explains. “One of the central questions of the opera is ‘how do you remember the fallen?’ Basically, the whole story revolves around Rick seeing the soldiers going off and dying. All of his buddies in Vietnam ended up dying, and then, of course, he himself dies. So the idea of remembering the fallen is a very important theme.” Another is the Cornish tune Theofanidis wrote, he says, as a kind of rallying cry. “It’s the idea that you don’t just train your body and your mind, you have to train your heart to not fall apart when you see the worst of humanity. You have to be stronger than that.”
“The opera is about 9/11 the way that Don Carlo is about the Spanish Inquisition. It’s the backdrop for a man called to a higher destiny.” — Thomas HampsonFor Hampson, those qualities of dedication and bravery are essential to portraying Rescorla. The baritone also started the process by reading Stewart’s book. “It’s a very powerful story,” he says, “a large beautiful arc of destiny and fate and discipline. Rick Rescorla was a man that I would have admired greatly, and would have counted myself very fortunate to have met.” Rescorla’s final act was undeniably heroic, says Hampson. But the singer argues that Heart of a Soldier is much more than a 9/11 story. “The opera is about 9/11 the way that Don Carlo is about the Spanish Inquisition,” he says. “It’s the backdrop for a man called to a higher destiny.”
Getting the Details Right
In preparation for the role, Hampson met with Susan Rescorla, whose own book, Touched by a Hero, is forthcoming this fall. (In the book, she writes that upon meeting Hampson, she told him he had the perfect build to play Rick. “As we talked,” she writes, “I was even more thrilled: he definitely has the same type of charismatic personality that Rick had.”)
Susan Rescorla consulted with the San Francisco team throughout the opera’s development, and Hampson says he learned a great deal about Rick from her.
“Rick loved to sing, he loved to write, to quote Shakespeare, Kipling and Chandler,” notes Hampson. “He embraced anything he found in his readings that emboldened his own spirit. I don’t think he was a Pollyanna. I think he was extremely astute. He knew the follies of humankind and found himself sympathetic to the point of helping everyone around him reach the path themselves.”
Yet, for Hampson, Rescorla was a true man of action. “The word that comes up most often is the notion of discipline,” he says. “His discipline was the road between action and consequence. He was extremely pragmatic about that…The last thing we hear him say is to the firefighters: ‘C’mon men, let’s go do some good.’ That was Rick, full stop.”
Hampson, a longtime advocate for American music, is clearly engaged by the opera’s story and its music. “Chris has written a very exciting score,” he says. “There’s a wonderful rhythmic propulsion through all of the scenes. It’s both declamatory and conversational, and the lyric themes are extraordinarily beautiful and very operatic.
“I think we are in a new landscape of sound and theatricality. There’s been a kind of breaking through in the last three or four years. We’re coming into a new generation of composers finding this hybrid of grand opera and theatricality, and I think it’s a very exciting thing.”
Theofanidis, meanwhile, is feeling good about the finished opera. He admits that when he started work on the project, the events of 9/11 seemed almost too big to confront. Today, his perspective has changed.
“These stories are true, and have touched all of us in very personal ways,” he says. “There was a lot of responsibility to get them right, because everybody remembers them in a very specific way. But I do feel that ten years after 9/11, with the government having gotten Osama bin Laden, the story has come full circle. I started to feel better about engaging the subject matter as time went on. The way we dealt with it all, even though you have these big pillars of Vietnam and 9/11, is to keep the focus on the characters. Ultimately, that made it possible to navigate.”