But we turned the opera into a place of pilgrimage and revelation for him.
Gus actually came to “Harvey Milk” in San Francisco, and he borrowed a few things from us, like “Tosca.” Which was in there because the night before Harvey Milk was murdered, he went to San Francisco Opera, and what was performed? “Tosca.” It was a very literal thing. Obviously Gus Van Sant’s 2008 film “Milk” exposed the story to many more people. When “Harvey Milk” premiered in Houston in 1995, Edward Rothstein’s review in The New York Times called it “a rambunctious combination of banality and effective drama, posturing, playfulness and polemics.” Before it went to San Francisco, the following year, Wallace and the librettist, Michael Korie, made some revisions, adding arias for the title character, adjusting some orchestrations, and paring down the whole thing. Gay men, long a fervent segment of opera’s audience, had rarely, if ever, been the subject of an opera. Philip Glass’s “Satyagraha,” about Gandhi Anthony Davis’s “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X” and John Adams’s “Nixon in China” were still fresh in people’s ears.īut in telling the story of the gay activist and politician who was killed in 1978 by a fellow member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Wallace introduced a twist. When he composed “Harvey Milk,” in the early 1990s, Stewart Wallace was adding to a string of much discussed “biopic” operas based on recent history.
