October 19 - November 18
I've biked enough miles on trails around Atlanta this past month to reach Boston, latest stop on my virtual world tour of places I've lived and loved.
I visited Boston in 2013 with my friend Suzanne to see where the city's founder John Winthrop and his nemesis Anne Hutchinson faced each other in the 1630s. Since 1992, I've drafted three or four scripts for an opera that I want to compose about them. Their confrontation is mythical, i.e., a true story that keeps happening -- and not just because their descendants faced off for President in 2004 (Kerry descended from Winthrop, Bush from Hutchinson).
[PHOTO: My friend Suzanne happened to be in Boston again Saturday, where she photographed one of the public gardens. I slipped in a selfie from my ride in downtown Atlanta the week before.]
My opera's working title is City on a Hill, because John Winthrop made that Biblical epithet for Jerusalem into the Massachusetts Bay Company's mission statement. Preaching on the deck of the Arbella before they landed, he said the Puritans must show the world how a faithful community can govern itself with mutual care. His inspirational sermon is history's first statement of "American exceptionalism" and the opening number for my opera. Then a big chorus number will cover the next few years as everyone pitches in to build Boston -- homes and government -- from scratch.
But I've also considered calling the opera Inner Voice for Anne Hutchinson's inner assurance that God had chosen her for heaven. When you've got that, she preached, you don't need "good works," sin isn't a deal-breaker, and no one but no one can tell you what's right for you to do. In the precarious balance between individual choice and community responsibility that we still see today in battles over mandates and gun regulations, she tipped the scale on the side of radical individualism. I wrote her first song with a scale outside the usual major-minor ones because she brings an alien element into Winthrop's precious project.
I love the fact that she moved across the street from the Winthrops with her doting husband and their 20-odd children. [A pizza place and a bank occupy those spaces today. See a photo from my pilgrimage to the site, along with other pictures of Suzanne and me on our New England trip in 2013]. Winthrop was alarmed to see both men and women, his wife included, filling Hutchinson's house to hear her teach, with an overflow crowd in the street. On Sundays, her followers heckled preachers who implied that salvation depended on doing "good works." Her male disciples gained office, including the governorship.
It took a couple of years, but Winthrop out-maneuvered her. The finale of act one is the chaotic election that he relocated outside of town where his rural supporters would outnumber her urban ones -- a kind of gerrymandering before that term existed. Once he re-takes the reins of government, he puts her on trial.
Although Winthrop wrote a book about their confrontation to justify his behavior to the English public, he's remarkably candid about the unnamed adversary he refers to as "that woman." Since Anne Hutchinson left behind no writings, we can thank Winthrop for reporting how she out-argued him and his minions on points of law and Scripture. In the end, Winthrop abandoned all pretense of reason and just pulled rank to expel her and her supporters.
For my opera, the climactic aria would be Anne's prophecy. When she saw that facts and law weren't going to win her case, she cut loose and predicted doom for all of her enemies. Officers sought to silence her, but Winthrop signaled them to let her go on: he saw an opportunity. When she finished, he asked innocently how she could be so sure about the future. God told me, she said. Even her supporters gasped, for everyone accepted that the time of God's revelation ended with the book of Revelation. She was effectively admitting to some kind of supernatural spirit communication, i.e., witchcraft.
When my friend Suzanne and I visited Boston in 2013, we saw posters for a new opera about, yes, Anne Hutchinson's confrontation with John Winthrop. Sigh. I was deflated.
Still, there are multiple operas about some characters, Orpheus, Figaro, Manon Lescaut. I'm retired now, with some time on my hands, so there may yet be a future for City on a Hill.
←← | ← || → Use the arrows to follow my bike tour from the start.
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