“But I really didn’t know about the Gold Rush any more than your average Californian did. “Part of the delight of this was that I know the area where these events take place,” Adams remarked in a recent interview. Her 23 letters, written to her sister back home and later published as “The Shirley Letters,” offered a revealing glimpse into Gold Rush life. The new work’s primary source was Louise Clappe - aka Dame Shirley - a doctor’s wife who came to California from Boston in 1851. Librettist Peter Sellars, left, urged his friend and frequent collaborator, composer John Adams, to read the “The Shirley Letters,” and the two wound up adapting the Gold Rush memoir into a new opera. Jacklyn Meduga/San Francisco Operaīut the opera, with a libretto by Adams’ longtime collaborator Peter Sellars, also portrays the darker realities of an era often reduced to a rollicking, rags-to-riches folk tale. Conducted by Grant Gershon, it’s the culminating event of Adams’ 70th birthday year. “Girls” tells the story of the Gold Rush, which began when a carpenter saw the first glint of metal in a nearby river, and thousands of fortune hunters descended on the region, desperate to claim some of its riches for their own.įor Adams, the Gold Country’s natural beauties were an inspiration for the work, which makes its world premiere in a San Francisco Opera production Nov. It was a good place to be, since the events of the opera take place close to his mountain getaway. That’s where he goes to compose, and it’s where he wrote much of his new opera, “Girls of the Golden West.”
John Adams has lived in Berkeley since the 1970s, but in recent years, he’s spent long stretches of time in a cabin in California’s Gold Country. Politically charged ‘Dreamer’ oratorio coming to BerkeleyĢ5 years later, SF’s Del Sol Quartet still championing new ‘craft music’
‘Girls of the Golden West’: Catch these related events John Adams' new Gold Rush epic set to debut at SF Opera Close Menu