It’s not every day you get the chance to hear an opera chorus chanting “Strike! Strike! Strike!” in vehement unison. By comparison with the old standby subjects — love, death, magic flutes — the modern labor movement has never been an obvious choice for opera composers and librettists.
“Dolores,”an opera currently being created in expectation of a world premiere next year, aims to fill that gap.
Working on a commission from West Edge Opera and a consortium of other companies, composer Nicolás Lell Benavides and librettist Marella Koch plan to tell the story of the labor activist Dolores Huerta, focusing on the1960s grape strikeby the United Farm Workers and the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.
There’s still plenty of work to be done before the opera is completed, but on Sunday, Aug. 13, West Edge gave a public workshop performance of excerpts from the work-in-progress. The hour’s worth of music that was presented, featuring a starry array of local singers led by conductor Mary Chun, suggested the creators are on the path toward a dynamic retelling of one of the nation’s pivotal moments.
In particular, “Dolores” seems intent on putting the story of the labor movement front and center, without sacrificing any of the personal characterization that gives opera its reason for being.
“I hope it’s considered a labor movement about people,” Benavides told me.
The timing could hardly be more apt, and I don’t just mean the arrival of Labor Day. The ongoing strikes of first thewritersand then theactorsin Hollywood, the potential strike by UPS workers that was narrowly averted last month, and the increasingly prevalent efforts to unionize such retail outlets as Starbucks all point to the importance of revisiting this landmark episode.
“This is an opera that’s set in the past,” Koch said, “but the story doesn’t begin and end with grapes, because it was never just about grapes. It’s about human rights, and unfortunately that fight is still very relevant today.”
“Dolores” covers a chronologically narrow but richly packed stretch of time in the late 1960s. It shows Huerta, together with labor leaders Cesar Chavez and Larry Itliong, organizing the 1965 strike by grape workers in Delano (Kern County) — a hard-fought action that would go on for years. It depicts Kennedy’s arrival on the scene and the promise of his support for the union, and it ponders the aftermath of his 1968 assassination on the night he had won the California primary.
For Benavides, the connection to this subject matter is personal as well as historical. Huerta is his cousin, and he grew up hearing her stories and inheriting some of her passion for justice.
The more immediate prompt, though, was the election of Donald Trump in 2016.
“I noticed all my colleagues were so down and depressed, like nothing this bad had ever happened before,” he said. “And I remember thinking, ‘It’s not as if Hillary Clinton gotassassinated.’ ”
The contrast, he said, was to the farmworkers who had been counting on Kennedy to help them to victory in their prolonged struggle.
“The writers have been on strike for three or four months now, the actors for one or two. But imagine being on strike for three years. And Bobby was supposed to save them! But they didn’t give up.”
The recent workshop performance was focused on some of the most prominent and dramatic episodes of the libretto — the first phases of the strike, Chavez’s controversial decision to undertake a hunger strike to attract attention and support, and Kennedy’s victory speech in Los Angeles’ Ambassador Hotel. (The actual assassination will not be part of the opera.) Richard Nixon, who was running for the Republican nomination, appears in a parodic fantasy dubbed “Tricky Dick.”
Most of the opera’s characters are long dead, but Huerta — still tirelessly active at 93 — was present for the event. The audience at the Taube Atrium Theater seemed electrified when she was introduced, rising as one to give her a standing ovation.
韦尔塔向观众的持续的娘家姓的d for political organization, led a chant of her trademark slogan “Sí se puede” (“Yes we can”) and threw a little shade at a current political figure by extolling the virtues of “Robert F. Kennedy …Senior.”
Talking by phone a week or so afterward, Huerta was still feeling the enthusiasm.
“I’ve seen myself in a documentary before,” she told me, referring to the 2017 film “Dolores” by director Peter Bratt. “But with an opera, it’s different. The music makes it so much more emotional, and Nick is a very talented composer.”
Huerta speaks from experience. She’s been an opera buff all her life, she said, beginning with “Porgy and Bess” and then moving on to such favorites as “La Bohème” and “Carmen,” which she just saw at Santa Fe Opera.
In the mid-1980s, when she was in Washington, D.C., working on immigration legislation, she frequently took the train to New York to attend performances at the Metropolitan Opera — sometimes two in a day — thanks to a nephew who worked for the company and had access to a box.
The showcase was the first time she’d heard any of Benavides’ opera, though, and he suspected it was the first time it had fully registered on her where its focus lay.
“From the first time I told her about the idea, her response has always been, ‘Oh, that’s great that you want to make an opera about Bobby Kennedy.’ I told her over and over again, it’s not about Bobby. It’s literally called ‘Dolores’!”
“Dolores” emerged fromAperture, the commissioning program that West Edge Opera launched during the pandemic. Other companies then joined in: San Diego Opera, the Broad Stage in Santa Monica and finally Opera Southwest in Benavides’ hometown of Albuquerque.
Mark Streshinsky, the general director of West Edge Opera, said the inclusion of Opera Southwest was an easy call, because the company’s home is on Dolores Huerta Way. The opera is scheduled for productions in San Diego and Santa Monica in fall 2024 before coming to West Edge for its 2025 summer festival.
Benavides estimates the workshop’s hour of music will wind up being about half of the full score, which leaves him plenty of composing yet to do. But hearing the completed scenes was an invaluable guide for the process.
“Being a composer mostly involves working in solitude, and you have to trust your imagination to carry you along. But I find the further along I go, the more I need to go to concerts — to hear other people’s music, to hear my music — just to be sure that I can trust things are working the way I imagine them.”
And the opera’s political thrust will remain intact, just as Huerta herself envisioned it. Benavides said at one point, he asked Huerta what she’d like people to take away from the opera.
”她说,“我将对人的爱ple to understand that they have power.’ Even without financial means or resources, there is still power.
“You know, on Labor Day you reflect on the history and think, ‘Oh the unions existed and now we have weekends, isn’t that great?’ But these people were strategists. They argued constantly, they worried that their ideas weren’t going to work out. And I wanted to show that aspect of it — that labor is a hard-fought struggle.”
Reach Joshua Kosman:jkosman@sfchronicle.com; Twitter:@JoshuaKosman