CINCINNATI — Some old cities have very good bones. Think of Rome, which, despite being sacked, bombed and repeatedly invaded, remains vibrant and inspiring. Cincinnati, an American city that is overlooked and undervalued, has similarly good bones and a proud history that enriches it in ways that few urban centers of comparable size or bigger can claim. It was built to last, with arts organizations, universities, libraries and solid buildings, some of which were created nearly two centuries ago that still contribute to the community’s quality of life.
In 2012, I wrote an article about Cincinnati and why this relatively small metropolis is one of the most active and innovative cities in America when it comes to operatic and symphonic music. Much of this activity has been centered at Music Hall, which opened in 1878, and is now being restored, meaning that the Cincinnati Symphony and Cincinnati Opera are performing elsewhere, primarily at the Aronoff Center, a two-theater complex downtown. Opera will return to Music Hall in 2018 as the company gears up for its centennial season in 2020.
The city is named for Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus (519–430 B.C.), who is said to have twice ruled ancient Rome and described as a model of civic virtue and good government. Although he held absolute power, he relinquished it when he felt the republic would be better served by stepping down. Public service has been part of the fabric of Cincinnati, whose metropolitan area has produced four presidents: William Henry Harrison, Benjamin Harrison, Ulysses S. Grant and William Howard Taft. In more recent times, and perhaps with less distinction, its mayor was Jerry Springer, who later became a talk show host with out-of-control guests and also was one of the few living people to have an opera written about him. The work is funny and quite rude (be warned) with music and lyrics by Richard Thomas as well as additional lyrics by Stewart Lee.
Between 1840 and 1860, Cincinnati was the sixth largest city in America. It was, in its way, a portal for freedom in that it was a refuge on the north side of the Ohio River for slaves who escaped the South on the Underground Railroad. Every visitor to the city should go to a museum near the river called the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center.
An opera, Margaret Garner, about a runaway slave, premiered in Detroit in May 2005 and was performed at Cincinnati Opera two months later. The music is by Richard Danielpour with a libretto by Toni Morrison, an Ohioan who received the Nobel Prize for Literature and whose books, including Beloved and The Bluest Eye, are vivid and beautiful explorations of the ongoing struggle for freedom of African-Americans.
Cincinnati was a center of anti-slavery activity, but not surprisingly, the city also became a destination for people who favored slavery. Some freed slaves were captured and returned to plantations in the South. This was often done by federal marshals acting under the dictates of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. The story of Margaret Garner inspired not only the opera but also Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved.
Cincinnati has approximately 300,000 citizens, and according to the 2010 U.S. census, the city is 49.3 percent white, 44.8 percent black and the remaining citizens are Latino or Asian. On my current visit I spent a few hours at the Findlay Market, which opened in 1852. It too has good bones and stands in the heart of a neighborhood that combines German and African-American heritages. What is distinct in the conversations I had with many of the black people in the market was that their ancestors have been in this neighborhood since before the Civil War. They spoke of oral histories passed down through their families that recounted the commitment to freedom of many Cincinnati whites, who were active in protecting escaped slaves.
Harriet Beecher Stowe, an abolitionist, moved to Cincinnati in 1832 at the age of 21. She wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1850) there and based it on her interaction with escaped slaves as well as witnessing pro-slavery riots in 1836 and 1841.
I came to Cincinnati earlier this month to attend two operas: Fidelio, Beethoven’s paean to freedom, and a new work, Fellow Travelers, with music by Gregory Spears, a libretto by Greg Pierce and a production by Kevin Newbury. (Full disclosure: I wrote the program article for Fidelio and gave a lecture about freedom as expressed in Mozart operas and Fidelio. My talk was at the Mercantile Library, founded in 1835 with a confident sense of the future — it has a 10,000 year lease!)
Fidelio, conducted by Jun Märkl and starring Christine Goerke and Russell Thomas, was musically stupendous — world-class throughout. As often happens with this opera, it was updated to a time near the present. In the days before the July 7 premiere, two African-American fathers — one in Louisiana, one in Minnesota — were shot to death by policemen. It was a poignant and beautiful thing to watch Goerke, who is white, and Thomas, who is black, sing and enact the most loving scenes of marital devotion. In the final moments of the opera, I had a strong mental image of a pile of guns being stacked in the middle of the stage as people on all sides relinquished their weapons and embraced the better aspects of their humanity. Would that it were so!
After the performance, it was shocking to return to my hotel room and discover that a sniper had just killed five Dallas police officers and injured others who were keeping the peace at a demonstration protesting the killings of the two fathers. These noble police officers reminded me of Rocco, the compassionate jailer in Fidelio.
And I thought, yet again, that when people say to me that opera is irrelevant and not about real life, they really don’t know what they are talking about.
It struck me too that three of the four operas being presented this season in Cincinnati (Die Fledermaus, Fidelio, Tosca) have scenes in jails — Fidelio is entirely located in a prison — while the characters in the fourth opera, Fellow Travelers, live in a prison of the mind, affected by homophobia, sexism and a fear of being punished for what one reads or believes.
Fellow Travelers is the story of two young men (played by tenor Aaron Blake and baritone Joseph Lattanzi) who fall in love in Washington, D.C. in the early 1950s. They work in the federal government but keep their relationship mostly a secret because of the witch hunts led by Sen. Joseph McCarthy, attorney Roy Cohn (himself a closeted gay man) and others against those considered “Unamerican,” including Communists and homosexuals.
Fellow Travelers achieves a universality equal to that of Fidelio because there are elements in it that speak to our common humanity in subtle yet palpable ways. It is the finest new opera I have seen since Jake Heggie and Terrence McNally’s Dead Man Walking premiered in 2000. The music is gorgeous but also very specific to the dramatic narrative. The lyrics are not so literal that they narrow the focus of the story. For example, the way women are depicted in the opera makes clear that 60 years ago they were marginalized because of their gender. There is only one character (beautifully played by soprano Devon Guthrie) who insists on thinking freely rather than submit to the oppression under which those who remain silent become complicit.
That Fidelio and Fellow Travelers can speak so directly to audiences, even though the former was composed in 1805 and the latter 210 years later, says so much about the unique expressive power of opera but also to the sad truth that the famous formulation by Martin Luther King that “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice” is still way too long and slow.