Chicago composer Florence Price roars back to life with new opera

Chicago proudly claims Florence Price as one of its own. After all, it was here that she became the first Black female composer to have a symphony performed by a major orchestra.

But this week, a new opera about Price’s origin story premiered in the Twin Cities in Minnesota, which has spent weeks at the epicenter of President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement campaign. Still, Minnesota Opera chose to charge ahead with its planned premiere of “My Name is Florence.”

Leaders said that is its own act of resistance.

“This particular story feels, to our company, so essential right now,” said Ryan Taylor, Minnesota Opera’s president and general director, adding that the project has been in the works for years.

“We planned this work having no idea what might be coming down the pike and so I think we feel a responsibility to the creators. It's exciting. And at the same time, there's sort of like a dull ache that won't go away.”

That ache hangs thick in the air in Minnesota right now. But on Saturday night, as crowds shuffled into the Ordway Center for the Performing Arts in downtown St. Paul for opening night of “Florence,” theatergoers said they were happy to have the arts to turn to.

“Coming here, I can see my temperature coming down. And just like, this peace,” said Anna Young of St. Paul, who attended the show with her adult son and 6-year-old granddaughter, Ella, who recently started playing the violin.

“My granddaughter is African American. [Price is] African American,” Young said. “You don't see this often. We're in Minnesota, so it's just like, Hey, let me expose my granddaughter to an amazing, awesome artist.”

Forgotten, then brought back to life

Price was born in 1887, shortly after the end of Reconstruction, in Little Rock, Arkansas. She moved to Chicago in the 1920s, where she pursued her music career. While she saw success, she also struggled to have her work performed due to her sex and race. And, for a period of time after her death, Price’s compositions were largely forgotten.

In recent years, Price’s music has become more widely known and performed. Now, as her own personal story powers this new show, it comes at a time when some of the nation’s preeminent champions of new operas, like the Met and Kennedy Center, each face uncertain futures. The Met, which is the largest performing arts organization in the country, announced layoffs and postponed works. After a wave of artists withdrew from performing at the Kennedy in protest of Trump’s decision to oust leadership and rename the venue after himself, the president said he’s closing the venue for two years for construction.

It colors a precarious moment for the classical arts, at a time when some people have retreated from seeing live performances, either due to fear of immigration enforcement or because of financial strains.

But, regional companies like Minnesota Opera, the Chicago Opera Theater and Lyric Opera of Chicago continue to back new works, with leaders like Taylor saying it’s essential to give the centuries-old art form new life.

The Florence Price chamber opera — which runs through Feb. 8 and is not currently scheduled to appear elsewhere — is a collaboration between librettist Harrison David Rivers and composer B.E. Boykin. A result of Minnesota Opera’s New Works Initiative, the show tells Price’s life story in a series of vignettes, set to an original score, with only a brief interlude of Price’s own music.

In a tight run that clocks in under 90 minutes, “Florence” highlights Price's childhood in Little Rock, her years at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston and her time spent living and working in what is now Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood. (A Frederick Stock character appears briefly on stage to mark the 1933 moment when the Chicago Symphony Orchestra asked to play Price’s Symphony No. 1 in E Minor. )

Rivers’ writing focuses less on Price’s professional arc and more so focuses on her home life and how, as a Black family in America, they faced discrimination as the Jim Crow era took hold in the South. Here, parts of the plot feel eerily relevant.

Anne Holzman, who lives in suburban Minneapolis, came to see the show with her husband, Lou. She said the show feels like a timely reminder that “some communities in the United States have been struggling with being under attack and under surveillance for centuries.”

After Price’s death in Chicago in 1953, her work was largely overlooked. But then, in 2009, troves of her music were rediscovered in a house in St. Anne, Illinois, which Price had used as a summer getaway.

In recent years, Price’s music has experienced a renaissance, with more orchestras programming her work and a Grammy-winning album of her songs, led by soprano Karen Slack. Boykin, the composer, said she feels like Price’s place in classical music history is now more solidified.

“I feel like I hear her name more often than when I first started hearing it and I think that that's exciting and it's important, even though it shouldn't have had to happen that way,” said Boykin, who is based in Atlanta. “I mean, all this music she wrote well within her prime, so it's sad that it took this long, but I am excited that people are speaking her name.”

Showing up for one another

As the opera singers took the stage on Saturday in one part of town, musicians of the Minnesota Orchestra responded in their own way, 10 miles away. The orchestra reworked its scheduled program to offer a memoriam to Alex Pretti and Renee Good, two citizens killed in January by federal agents in Minneapolis. The company swapped out Paul Dukas’ lively “Sorcerer's Apprentice” in favor of the more mournful “Adagietto” from Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 5.

“We share it with love for our audience and our beautiful city,” the orchestra wrote in a statement posted on its website and social media.

Back inside the Ordway, Taylor took the stage ahead of “Florence” and acknowledging the outside world, he said, “I have been so impressed by how Minnesotans have been showing up for each other.”

He was met with roaring applause as one attendee yelled, “ICE out!”

As the lights went dark, soprano Flora Hawk entered the stage as Florence Price, beginning with this libretto:

Maybe you’ve heard of me, maybe you’ve not. 
I was forgotten for many years. 
So many of us have been forgotten. … 
But that doesn’t mean we should stay that way. 
Remember me. Remember my music. Remember my name.