Beginning with X, The Life and Times of Malcolm X, in 1986, and continuing with Under the Double Moon (1989), Tania (1992) and Amistad (1997), Anthony Davis has created dynamic operas that reflect American life and culture.

In March 2007, as the centerpiece of its forty-ninth season, Opera Omaha will present the world premiere of Davis’s fifth opera, Wakonda’s Dream. The opera is a meditation on the 1879 trial of Ponca Indian Chief Standing Bear. It was a landmark case: the Poncas had been ordered off their land near Omaha and removed to Indian Territory (later Oklahoma). When the land that the government had given them proved useless — among other things, they were not able to support themselves by hunting — Chief Standing Bear and his followers returned to Nebraska to reclaim their land. They were arrested, jailed and abused but eventually went to court to try to win their right to return to their home. The trial was a significant event in U.S. history, because the verdict stated for the first time in American jurisprudence that Indians were “persons within the meaning of the law” and therefore had the rights of citizenship. It allowed Chief Standing Bear to reside in the original Ponca territory and to bury his son there. The modern-day Indian family with which Davis frames the story reflects the rather depressing realities of Native American life in the present, and ties this life to the spiritual heritage and destiny of the Ponca tribe.

OPERA NEWS: How did the Wakonda’s Dream project come into existence?

ANTHONY DAVIS: I was approached initially by Joan Desens, the general manager of Opera Omaha. I guess I was recommended by [stage director] Rhoda Levine, who had spoken to Joan about doing an opera centered around the Standing Bear trial. Rhoda had recommended Yusef Komunyakaa as the librettist, so we all met to talk about it. Initially, I had second thoughts, because I didn’t want to do another opera about a trial. And a lot of the issues in Amistad are similar. [Davis’s Amistad, which had its premiere at Lyric Opera of Chicago, deals with the trial of the slaves who took control of the ship Amistad, and whose attempt to return to their native land ended in a shipwreck on the Long Island coast. In their subsequent trial, they won the right not to be returned to slavery.]

ON: So the trial theme was problematic for you?

AD: Yeah, and also the fact that in a way the trials were both pyrrhic victories. One was saying, in the Amistad case, that they weren’t actually slaves at all, they were captives. And therefore [the slavers] had no right to hold them. In the Standing Bear case, it was basically saying that Standing Bear, this individual, had a right of habeas corpus, so he could live where he wanted as long as he didn’t infringe on other people’s rights. But it didn’t give any rights to the tribe. So both were very limited understandings of freedom and occasions where there was a glimmer of hope for change.

However, I was very intrigued by the topic. I’m part Native American myself, and that’s one reason why I was so drawn to it. I was [invited] to go to a powwow of the Poncas a couple of summers ago, and it was really an illuminating experience. I met this woman whose son had the gift of sight. He could see the future and was hesitant to do the ghost dance, because he would actually see ghosts. After talking to his mother, I began to think about anchoring the story in the present and having it haunted by the past, and then focusing on a child who actually sees and relates to Standing Bear. Actually, the way the opera begins is that the sound will be in the room as people take their seats. You’re surrounded by it, you feel you’re in the environment. And then that slowly becomes the music, and the opera begins to build with the singing and everything. The opera’s spirit quality is going to be an important part of the beginning, and also later on. I’m working with a really wonderful sound designer named Earl Howard. We’re developing a whole sound language that will go throughout the piece. It’ll be emphasized a lot in the beginning of the opera and also at a couple of [subsequent] dramatic points.

ON: Jason, the father character in the opera, is conflicted about his identity.

AD: Right. And it’s his vision quest that [provides] the bookends of the opera. That’s where the opera begins and ends.

ON: His wife, Delores, seems not to have that inner conflict.

AD: Well, I think that it is part of this kind of ritual of when you put the children to bed and you tell them a story. She’s telling the story of how the Ponca were removed from Nebraska and moved to Oklahoma, and how Chief Standing Bear brought some of the Ponca back after the death of his son. Then you start to hear the people who are actually in the interpretive staging, the Native people. So when you see them come to life, and they start to sing, they describe what’s happening. And then finally the child sees Standing Bear himself. And then there’s a relationship between the [modern] child and Standing Bear’s child, so I think of that part of it as the interjection of the magical realm, of seeing the past in the present. I tried to make the interaction between Delores and her son light in a way. It’s almost a playful interaction.

ON: Could we talk a bit about what motivates the political side of your operas?

AD: Well, I think there are a lot of unanswered questions and things to be addressed in our history, and I [believe] part of my function as a composer is to make people think about these things — and not just think, but feel. For me, Malcolm X’s murder was a very emotional point. I have my memories as a child of when that happened, and it has a lot of emotional resonance for me. So I think it’s important for me to revisit those times in order to understand them and the feelings [they inspire]. When I first decided to do X, it was kind of a transgressive act in terms of trying to subvert what the expectations of opera were, and also to bring those musical forces to bear on what I thought was a tragic, heroic figure. But it was also shocking in terms of what one would expect from an opera as the representation of [social] class, etc., with the audience. What interests me as a composer is the prospect of bringing people into the opera house who haven’t been there before — the prospect of taking this old European form and making it into a vital, exciting, American form. That transformation is one of the things that make composing opera so exciting.

ON: One of the things I admire about X is its underlying tension. All the way through the opera, even in the childhood scenes, you sense what Malcolm X must have felt in the way of the pressures on him.

AD: Yeah. The music has to create a momentum toward the inevitable. I think of music almost as a beast, something that you put into motion. And, if you do it right, what happens in the drama of the story has to happen, because of the music. It’s almost like there’s a bloodlust in music. I don’t know how else to describe it. Sometimes it’s not even a conscious thing. It’s a relationship of how musical structures build on each other, how you can use motivic material, all those things you do that raise the stakes and make whatever happens happen.

Costume design by Paul Tazewell © Paul Tazewell 2006