After Dinner Opera Company Presents SACCO AND VANZETTI Opera By Blitzstein And Lehrman

After Dinner Opera Company presents the New York and Orchestral staged premiere of Sacco and Vanzetti, begun by Marc Blitzstein, completed & conducted by Leonard Lehrma, and directed by Benjamin Spierman.

Starring Christopher Remkus as Nicolo Sacco and Michael Niemann as Bartolomeo Vanzetti with David Anchel, David Aubrey, Sarah Blaze, Kevin Courtemanche, Jonathan Z. Harris, Aumna Iqbal, Karen Jolicoeur, Andrew Klima, Josh Minkin, Perri Sussman, Christopher Tefft, Zachary Tirgan, Helene Williams, Henry Yen and members of The Metropolitan Philharmonic Chorus and Orchestra

Playing Saturday, Sept 10, 2022 at 7 pm, and Sunday Sept 11, 2022 at 3 pm at Lehman College Studio Theatre, 250 Bedford Park Boulevard West, The Bronx

American composer Marc Blitzstein (1905-1964), whom Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein credited with virtually inventing American opera, began writing the three-act Sacco and Vanzetti, commissioned by the Ford Foundation, optioned by the Metropolitan Opera, in 1959. His untimely death prevented the composer from finishing the work that was to be his "magnum opus" about the notorious trial and execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti for a robbery and murder they had not committed in the 1920s. The Lehman production, presented by the After Dinner Opera Company, directed by Bronx Opera General Director Benjamin Spierman, September 10 & 11, marks the fully staged orchestral premiere of the opera, featuring a cast of 35 singers and orchestra, conducted by Lehrman.

The story of the opera's completion began in 1970, with Lehrman's interest in the music of Blitzstein. With encouragement from his mentor Elie Siegmeister, Leonard Bernstein and Nadia Boulanger, with whom Lehrman and Blitzstein and Siegmeister had all studied, Lehrman completed Blitzstein's unfinished opera, Idiots FIrst. In 1978, while working as Assistant Chorus Master at the Met, Lehrman turned his attention to Sacco and Vanzetti, and after finishing Act I in 1999, was offered a contract by the Blitzstein Estate to finish the entire work.

Nicola Sacco, a shoemaker born in Puglia, and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, a fish peddler from Villafalletto, Piedmont region, were Italian immigrant anarchists accused of murdering a guard and a paymaster during the April 15, 1920, armed robbery of the Slater and Morrill Shoe Company in South Braintree, Massachusetts. The case drew worldwide attention, and Sacco and Vanzetti became the center of one of the largest causes celebres in modern history. Protests on their behalf were held throughout North America, South America, Europe, and Australia. Despite the worldwide outpouring of support, and a series of appeals by celebrated writers, artists, and academics, including future Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter and fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, the verdict was upheld. Sacco and Vanzetti were executed in the electric chair just after midnight on August 23, 1927. Fifty years later, in a proclamation by Massachusetts Governor Michael S. Dukakis (whose character appears in the opera), they were exonerated.

Marc Blitzstein (March 2, 1905-January 22, 1964)

was born in Philadelphia to a musical family, and showed musical promise as a pianist at a young age. He began composing lieder and short piano pieces in his teens, before going on to study composition at the Curtis Institute from 1924-26, and then in Europe with Nadia Boulanger and Arnold Schoenberg. Through his involvement with the Composers Collective of New York and the New York Composers Forum-Laboratory, Blitzstein came in contact with the preminent composers of the New York new music scene of the 1920s and 30s, including Aaron Copland, Henry Cowell, Hanns Eisler, and Charles Seeger. In 1939 he formed a friendship with Leonard Bernstein, who became one of the most vocal proponents of his music, calling Blitzstein's contribution to American musical theater "incalculable".

Blitzstein achieved his first notable success with his one act opera Triple Sec (1928). His best known work is his 1937 musical The Cradle Will Rock, a pro-union political satire which lampoons corporate greed and champions the average "Joe Worker".

Blitzstein composed in all genres, but the theater gave him his greatest successes - The Cradle Will Rock, Regina (a 1949 opera for Broadway), and an English adaptation of the Weill/Brecht The Threepenny Opera (1954). At the time of his unexpected and tragic death in 1964, music of his work, including his opera Sacco and Vanzetti, was left unfinished and unpublished. For more information on Marc Blitzstein, please visit http://ljlehrman.artists-in-residence.com/Blitzstein100.html

Composer/conductor, graduated cum laude from Harvard, received a master's degree and a doctorate in music composition from Cornell, a master's degree in library science from Long Island University, and studied under a Fulbright scholarship in Paris with Nadia Boulanger. Born in Kansas, raised in New York, Lehrman's prodigious output consists of more than 260 works to date, including 12 operas, and 7 musicals, along with more than 400 vocal works,65 translations, and 21 adaptations/completions of works begun by Marc Blitzstein.

Beginning in 1977, he worked as conductor, coach, pianist, composer, and/or translator for the Metropolitan Opera, and numerous other opera companies in the U.S. and Europe. In 1983 he founded the Jewish Music Theater Association of Berlin; in 1988 the Metropolitan Philharmonic Chorus. As an editor, critic, and author, Lehrman edited The Marc Blitzstein Songbook (Boosey & Hawkes, 1999-2003); authored Marc Blitzstein: A Bio-Bibliography (Greenwood/Praeger, 2005), was Editor of Opera Today, Associate Editor of Opera Monthly, and has written for Opera Review, The Forward, Jewish Week, Jewish Currents, The New Music Connoisseur, Soundwordsight.com and numerous other publications. He is currently Minister of Music at Grace Lutheran Church in Malverne, High Holidays Music Director of the Metropolitan Synagogue (since 2014), and Reference Librarian at Oyster Bay-East Norwich Public Library (since 1995). He and his wife Helene Williams Spierman teach at Court Street Music (founded in 1999) in Valley Stream.

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