Vivian DeGain Better at 50 Blog
Columnist and arts writerReview of Margaret Garner in Detroit
Michigan Opera Theatre presents “Margaret Garner” by Richard Danielpour and Toni Morrison at the Detroit Opera House.
“Margaret Garner” composer praises Detroit and her people
By Vivian DeGain
Oakland Press 10/17/2008
When composer Richard Danielpour and writer Toni Morrison came to Detroit and the Michigan Opera Theatre to collaborate and create “Margaret Garner,” based on the true story which Morrison had recreated in her novel “Beloved,” it would not be an overstatement to say that history was made there and then.
When else can we remember a Nobel Prize-winning author and poet joining forces with a Guggenheim and Rockefeller composer, two great living artists of our time, coming to the Motor City and finding it not just any place, but the place, to achieve the task.
“It was quite an experience three and a half years ago for six weeks in April and May, to work here with Toni. Here, living in the contrast of the gritty urban landscape of downtown Detroit where I stayed while I was here – and the utter warmth of the people I encountered who were the most compassionate and empathetic to what we were doing anywhere – it was unforgettable,” Danielpour said in a phone interview from his home in New York.
“No other city, even my own New York City, offered me that kind of solidarity, support in the way that a community can treat an artist. So I have a very special affinity for Detroit, the place where ‘Margaret Garner’ was born,” the composer said, especially of the gracious hospitality of Dr. David DiChiera, the MOT artistic director.
So, Detroit was not just the place where the opera was born, but the best place, he said.
And “Garner” could only be an opera.
“Toni and I had to consider why this had to be an opera, not a movie, not a play. We went forward because it has all the earmarks of the dramatic musical theater that only opera is. Opera is an extreme media. It is not life as we know it, but a heightened, exaggerated yet not untrue version of the story. This is a human story about two families, one white (slave owners) and one black (slaves) connected. It is also a personal story, about love – the divine love between a mother and a child. And because it is set in the Civil War era, it is about the public, the social and the political – race and class,” Danielpour said.
The story is best presented as opera he said, because words alone cannot express the story, music begins where words leave off.
Margaret Garner was a runaway slave fleeing with her child and baby, who when facing recapture and the anguish, terror and humiliation of living not a person but as a property, chooses for her daughters the only freedom that she can offer them: Their death. The murder is her act of love, especially for the females who are used as more than servants, but as breeding stock for the master.
Morrison has said that when she did the research about the true story, Garner was tried for destruction of property – not murder. She was struck that Garner was unapologetic, not insane, a mother who loved her children more than most of us could.
Danielpour said opera alone could portray this story and the complexity of the mother’s plight. “Music has the ability and the power to enter the place where there are no words. The composer Felix Mendelssohn said that music expresses precisely that which is not too vague, nor too concise for words.”
And opera is more than music, it is the visual spectacle of set, costumes, characters and drama.
“In every opera there is an underlying hum underneath the story, the music that gives it a continuity, a base line,” the composer said.
“In ‘Margaret Garner,’ the underlying hum, the question is ‘Who matters?’ And my clarity is that all people matter. The next question, the corollary and the companion to ‘Who matters?’ is, ‘What do we value in this country?’ which is not only about our history, but makes us citizens of this century, embracing our now, our defining moment today,” Danielpour said. “If the houses keep getting filled to see ‘Margaret Garner’ it is because it addresses the issues that are raw and ripe today and this year.”
Opera, he said is the construction that holds this all together.
“Opera is the marriage, the body of words and music. Tony’s libretto is the bone. The music is the muscle and flesh. The words hold the music together and the two become a new and living organism.
“The orchestra is another character, invisible but always there, which gives it the quality of being a witness. The choruses become the pillars of the work. In ‘Margaret Garner’ there are two, a black and a white chorus, and they are the architectural structure that holds up all of its intensity, as well as relate its private and intimate stories. If opera works it exists on so many levels.”
Danielpour was born in New York City in 1956 and is a graduate of the New England Conservatory and the Juilliard School of Music. He has been commissioned nationally and internationally from the symphony orchestras of New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Washington, D.C.
“Margaret Garner” the opera was commissioned by the MOT, the Opera Company of Philadelphia and the Cincinnati Opera, and made its world premiere at the Detroit Opera House in May 2005. It was performed at the New York City Opera and Opera Carolina.
Returning to the DOT are many artists who created the roles for the world premiere. Margaret Garner is alternately played by Denyce Graves and Tracie Luck. Robert Garner is played by Gregg Baker and Patrick Blackwell. Cilla will be alternately sung by two sopranos making their MOT debuts, Karen Slack and Mary Elizabeth Williams. Plantation owner Edward Gaines will be performed by James Westman and Timothy Mix.
Broadway director Kenny Leon returns to direct, following his most recent Tony Award-winning project, “A Raisin in the Sun” on Broadway with Phylicia Rashad and Sean “P. Diddy” Combs. Critically-acclaimed conductor Stefan Lano also returns to conduct and as in the 2005 premiere, and the 2008 performances feature detailed sets by Marjorie Bradley Kellogg and period costumes by Paul Tazewell.
