She added: “If you don’t know the book if you, like me, didn’t grow up with snow if you’ve never seen an opera, there are so many things that make this opera so accessible and familiar.Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 15:02:40 Boxid IA176301 Boxid_2 CH104601 Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II City New York Donor “Our challenge is to make the opera as magical as possible.” “There are a lot of people who are stepping in for the first time,” she said. Omer Ben Seadia, the director of the production, said she hoped the work would resonate with people, even if they had never read “The Snowy Day” or seen an opera before. When Peter sees the snow outside his window at the start of the opera, he sings: Some passages evoke hymns others, like the snowball fight, take a jazzy, irreverent turn.īecause there is no dialogue in the book, much of the libretto is invented. He chose to ground the score in a four-note motif that appears throughout the opera, which lasts about an hour. “I had to let go of all of the lenses of fear that I had sort of put over my eyes as just being a Black man in this world, and really look at the world through Peter’s eyes.” “It has the same mission of centering Black humanity and the complex interiority of Blackness in America,” he said. But he also sees parallels to his previous work. “The Snowy Day” was a different kind of challenge, giving Thompson a chance to focus on a world of wonder and whimsy. That choral piece sets to music the final words of seven Black men killed during encounters with the police.
He is best known for “The Seven Last Words of the Unarmed,” which premiered in 2015. Thompson has long had an interest in connecting music to social issues. “That is the universal nature of ‘The Snowy Day.’” “It’s about a loving family who happens to be a family of color,” Pinkney said.
(An early draft described him as a “brown sugar boy.”) They reworked the libretto several times, choosing to describe Peter as a “beautiful boy” rather than to explicitly mention his race. They added a father, who is featured in later books by Keats but not in “The Snowy Day,” to avoid any suggestion that Peter was being raised by a single mother.
The creators wanted the work to show a Black family that was happy and intact to counter stereotypes in popular culture of dysfunction and despair in Black communities. Several new characters are introduced, including Amy, a Latina friend of Peter’s who teaches him some words in Spanish. While Thompson and Pinkney tried to stay true to the spirit of Keats’s work, they also took liberties.
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