The composer John Adams and his frequent collaborator, the librettist and director Peter Sellars, are getting the band back together with “Girls of the Golden West,” a new opera about the women of California’s Gold Rush. It will receive its world premiere at San Francisco Opera in 2017, the company announced on Tuesday.
The two men have collaborated on operas that have become part of the American canon: Mr. Sellars directed the first productions of many of Mr. Adams’s works, including “Nixon in China,” “The Death of Klinghoffer” and “Doctor Atomic,” which was also set to his libretto.
Their new opera, which is drawn from historical sources, will weave together the stories of women living in a small mining community in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in 1850. Mr. Sellars said he was drawn to the period after he came across a trove of historical material while he was working on a production of Puccini’s Gold Rush opera, “La Fanciulla del West,” which is usually translated in English as “The Girl of the Golden West.”
“These true stories of the Forty-Niners are overwhelming in their heroism, passion and cruelty, telling tales of racial conflicts, colorful and humorous exploits, political strife and struggles to build anew a life and to decide what it would mean to be American,” he said in a statement.
Mr. Adams, who lives in California, noted that the Gold Rush was California’s first economic bubble, and said in a statement that it brought out “the very best and the very worst of human traits, from scenes of ugly nativist racism and casual violence to examples of nobility, generosity and ingenuity — and of course there was always that great humor, gritty and self-deprecating.”
“To be able to set to music the authentic voices of these people, whether from their letters or their songs or from newspaper accounts from their time, is a great privilege for me,” he added.
The work is a coproduction with the Dallas Opera, Amsterdam’s Dutch National Opera and the Teatro La Fenice in Venice. It was commissioned by David Gockley, the retiring general director of San Francisco Opera, who also commissioned the 1987 premiere of “Nixon in China” when he led the Houston Grand Opera.
As San Francisco Opera announced the premiere of this new work by one of America’s best-known composers, Opera Philadelphia and New York’s Music-Theatre Group announced the newest member of its three-year composer-in-residence program: Rene Orth, 30, who studied at the Curtis Institute of Music and wrote a chamber opera, “Empty the House.” She will be the sixth composer in the program, following Missy Mazzoli, Lembit Beecher, Andrew Norman, David T. Little and David Hertzberg.
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