In some ways, says Maestro Anton Coppola, composer and librettist of Sacco and Vanzetti, he's been working on the opera since he was 10 years old.
"I was brought up in the sort of Italian ghetto neighborhood in East Harlem in New York," he says. "And in the '20s, of course, the discussion around the table was Sacco and Vanzetti. And by the way, the feeling was not of any sympathy for them, or taking sides regarding their guilt or innocence, but just that our compatriots got themselves in trouble, and it's too bad, that sort of thing."
The trouble that Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti got into was an accusation of murder — the murder on April 15, 1920, of Frederick Parmenter and Allesandro Beradelli, paymaster and guard for the Slater and Morrill Shoe Factory in South Braintree, Mass. Parmenter and Beradelli were transferring $15,000 from one building to another when two men in dark clothes and caps shot them repeatedly, grabbed the payroll boxes, jumped into a large car that pulled up beside them, and sped off. Almost a month later, Sacco and Vanzetti, anarchists who carried guns and lied to the police about their political beliefs, were charged with the deaths. After trials rife with confusion, dubious evidence and absurd "identifications," the two men were found guilty.
For seven years they remained in prison while appeal after appeal was filed and rejected, and the case became world famous. As their executions were being prepared, 10,000 policemen and 18,000 soldiers were needed to protect the American embassy in Paris, and protests were made by H.G. Wells, Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann and the Vatican. But to no avail: On Aug. 23, 1927, the two anarchists died in the electric chair. Whether they were guilty still isn't known; but it does seem evident that they didn't get a fair trial.
So how did the maestro's childhood memory of the case eventually turn into an opera? He had written one before — a comic piece called Saverio, which never got further than the bottom drawer of his desk. Coppola was devoting himself to conducting when, one day in New Orleans about six years ago, the celebrated case suddenly "bubbled up" from his subconscious. "Then I decided to go to the library there, and asked them to give me everything they had on Sacco and Vanzetti. And they gave me about five volumes, which I digested, and I wrote a synthesis of that."
About six months later, he was visiting his nephew, the film director Francis Ford Coppola, in his Napa Valley home, and read the synthesis to him over cigars and wine. Half a year later the director called his uncle to tell him that he'd decided to create a television documentary about Sacco and Vanzetti and would like to hear music that might be appropriate for it.
"So on the basis of that, I was inspired to write four or five pieces, purely on spec," Coppola recalls. "Well, he came to New York, I played it for him (on piano), and he said, "Oh my God, Uncle, this is an opera! And I'm not going to be able to do anything about that documentary because I have some other things I have to take care of first.'"
But now, the elder Coppola wanted to continue, and by 1999 he had a finished work.
Of course, there were some difficult decisions to make along the way. For example, in what language, Italian or English, should the libretto be written? And what music would be appropriate to a contemporary opera set in the 1920s?
As it turned out, Coppola says, the two questions answered each other: "The first thing that occurred to me was that when these Italians are among themselves, in their own community, naturally they would speak in their own language, in their native tongue. … Therefore, I suppose that the music that their words were couched in became Italianate in character. When they were, however, in contact with the, in quotes, "American" world — which, by the way, to these anarchists became a hostile world — of course they were forced to communicate in English. Then the music becomes, let's call it — "angular' — let's say "Americanized.' In fact, there's one scene where these ladies meet for tea, and these ladies are in sympathy with Sacco and Vanzetti; they're the kind of ladies that we call "limousine liberals,' their hearts are in the right places, and their music is what I think is American."
Other cities had a chance to premiere Sacco and Vanzetti, Coppola says, before Judith Lisi of the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center gave her go-ahead to the project. Salt Lake City nearly said yes — until the board of the opera company there balked at the projected $700,000 budget. And opera companies in Cleveland and Orlando also passed on the work, leaving it a question mark until, Coppola says, Lisi "sat me down to lunch, and she said "Maestro, I want to hear your opera. I want to hear it.' And so she set the wheels in motion."
What happens to the opera after the Tampa production? "That's the $64 loaded question," says Coppola. National and international press representatives have been invited, and "if the opera receives critical as well as public acclaim and acceptance, of course all the opera managers are going to want to jump on the bandwagon. If it's a failure who wants to touch it? Who wants to go near it?"
Sacco and Vanzetti, a rare world premiere for this area, opens on March 16 and plays for only three performances. Its fate after that can't possibly be guessed.
But it's possible — just possible — that its opening will be remembered as a historic event for Tampa Bay arts.
This article appears in Feb 15-21, 2001.