A Life Custom-Made for Opera : Harvey Milk, gay activist, San Francisco politician and martyr is the soul of a new contemporary work.

It is not a nice night, especially for anyone preparing to present an opera portraying the life and assassination of the first well-known gay-activist politician in California.

The evening is cold and damp. An interview with composer Stewart Wallace and librettist Michael Korie takes place at a quiet restaurant, a place for the harried composer (who is working day and night finishing the laborious orchestration) and librettist to relax. But it is a tense night, anyway. It is Election Night, and the early results indicate a new less-liberal political landscape that could easily mean less tolerance toward “Harvey Milk,” which will have its premiere Saturday night at the Houston Grand Opera.

The election is relevant in another way, too. Dianne Feinstein, running for reelection to her U.S. Senate seat, happens to be a character in the drama. She is, in fact, one of the first voices heard in the opera, as she, who on that day in 1978 was president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and acting mayor, announces Milk’s murder to the media. She and Milk had often clashed, but tonight Wallace and Korie wish her victory nonetheless.

“Harvey Milk” will be a controversial opera, but not so much because of its protagonist. Milk himself is authentic operatic material, and his story is tragedy of classical proportions, as the moving Academy Award-winning documentary “The Times of Harvey Milk” proved a decade ago. A Goldwater Republican and closeted homosexual comes out, quits his Wall Street job, moves to San Francisco and is radically politicized. Elected to the Board of Supervisors in 1977, Milk became not only the charismatic voice of the gay Castro Street district, but also an indefatigable fighter for the elderly and for ethnic minorities.

A year later, Milk was shot along with San Francisco Mayor George Moscone by a disgruntled, deeply disturbed right-wing supervisor, Dan White, who was a villain also of operatic proportions. He might have been the subject of farce, as well: White used the so-called Twinkie defense, claiming that junk food impaired his mind.

But opera, Korie points out, is not docudrama, and “Harvey Milk” is more than one man’s tragedy. “Harvey Milk’s story was inseparable from the history of the gay movement in America,” the librettist explains, “and in the opera, Harvey Milk is presented as the mythic and emotional center of that history.”

The operatic Milk demonstrates the implications of Harvey Milk in following his own personal odyssey, Korie says, “to give the general public a notion of what it was like to live in the closet, and just what coming out meant.” In the end, “Harvey Milk” is an opera about knowing yourself and using that knowledge to try to change the world around you, despite the opposition and intolerance.

Some of that intolerance, moreover, seems to continue. Korie mentions that a gay radio reporter who interviewed him in Houston has received a death threat. The general director of the Houston Grand Opera, David Gockley, says that the company is “hunkering down.” “We are aware that the more publicity there is for the opera, the more backlash there may be,” Gockley said, “and we are getting our reasons for doing it together.”

That means being prepared to justify not just performing “Harvey Milk,” which will also be given by the New York City Opera in April and the San Francisco Opera in the fall of 1996, but for dreaming up the opera and fostering its realization.

One of the company’s justifications is simply its belief in Wallace and Korie. Neither has much of a reputation yet, but both have been nurtured by Gockley and his company, one of the most venturesome of the major opera companies in America.

“Stewart Wallace came to light when we did a project called one-aria opera,” Gockley recalls. “Stewart, just out of the University of Texas, contributed a 10-minute piece called ‘Soap,’ a kind of mini-dramatized soap opera, and I knew immediately that this guy was talented and that he should go to New York and Juilliard, which he did.”

At the time of his first exposure to the Houston Grand Opera in the early ‘80s, Wallace, who was born in 1960, says he was still a self-taught composer, still a fledgling pop musician who was trying to push the envelope of the three-minute song form, and the natural way to do that was to go into music theater.

While at Juilliard, he heard a tape of songs written by Korie, a journalist who edited a neighborhood newspaper and a frustrated music theater composer and lyricist. Wallace remembers that he telephoned Korie and simply wouldn’t get off the phone until Korie agreed to meet with him. Wallace had the idea for a satirical opera that would dramatize the Reagan years with grotesque, cartoonish characters.

That opera became “Where’s Dick?,” which was produced by the Houston Grand Opera in a frantically absurd production by Richard Foreman in 1988. Performed outdoors, the opera--with its gleefully mean-spirited caricatures of good and evil, and its dizzying musical styles--announced a new composer/librettist team with an unmistakable flair for extravagance and controversy. The local press accused the opera company of stooping to pornography to sell tickets.

For their next opera, “Kabbalah,” Wallace and Korie went to the seemingly opposite extreme, selecting as its subject mystical Judaism for a music theater piece that was first performed in 1989 at the Dance Theater Workshop in New York as part of the New Music America festival. Next, they explored the notions of high art and low in “Hopper’s Wife,” a preposterous fantasy in which American painter Edward Hopper is married to Hollywood gos sip columnist Hedda Hopper. Not yet staged, the work has been given in concert form at Minneapolis’ Walker Arts Center.

All three of these works are what Korie calls “anti-opera opera.” There is a continual complement of opposites. The ritualistic “Kabbalah” can become happily celebratory; one section, for instance, contains what conductor and early Wallace and Korie champion John DeMain calls “maybe the best use of 5/4 time since Paul Desmond’s ‘Take Five.’ ” On the other hand, the farcical “Where’s Dick?” can be disarmingly operatic at moments.

With “Harvey Milk,” Korie says that he and Wallace have written an “opera opera.” “In Milk we felt that we had finally found a subject where we could write an opera that didn’t hide behind a veil of cynicism or obfuscation, and the best way to do so was to return to standard opera format--three acts, true arias, love duets, ensemble pieces and so on.”

But the opera also serves as a culmination of all their previous collaborations. It is a synthesis of the same polarities found in their earlier operas, with their radical contrasts of high and low art and of spiritual and mundane life. And it demonstrates contrasts between the collaborators as well.

Talking informally over dinner, they appear good friends, although there is a slight formality between them. They listen to each other respectfully, seeming to enjoy each other’s company. They exhibit no overt competitiveness. They speak frankly of their strengths and weaknesses (Korie describes himself as a far better librettist than composer). They speak little of their private lives, but Korie, who is five years older than Wallace and who had once covered the gay scene for the Village Voice, acknowledges his “lover of 18 years” in his official biography; Wallace, in conversation, mentions his girlfriend.

They speak of Judaism as something that has drawn them together and that a trip they took to Israel to research “Kabbalah” had a profoundly spiritual effect on both of them. They both emphasize how important Harvey Milk’s Jewish background is not only to their own identification with Milk but also to the kind of politician he became.

Korie’s libretto, based on extensive period research and interviews, is a complex, intricate look at America during the period of Milk’s life. Its three acts are “The Closet,” “The Castro” and “City Hall.” But Milk’s odyssey is also, in the opera, a metaphor for a spiritual journey.

“When we approached the opera we realized from the onset that many people in the gay and straight world would not know who Harvey Milk was,” Korie explains. “There is no sense of gay politics figuring into American history overall. It certainly is not taught in schools or families, and just to take Harvey Milk from the point where he moved to Castro and became politicized would not have shown battles that made him who he was.

“The thing that made him so interesting to us was that he had a prior life that was so different than what the popular impression of him became,” Korie continues. “Harvey was a well-established stockbroker, an opera subscriber, a closeted gay with little particular interest in politics except having once campaigned for Goldwater.

“It was only in the wake of the Stonewall Uprising (the 1969 confrontation between police and gays in Greenwich Village) that Milk was able to accept himself both as gay and Jew and say that if he could stand up for one part of himself he could stand up for both, that he was able to forge a personal morality. And that’s what enabled him to go out there to become an effective leader,” he says.

“ ‘I am just one person, but I have power; I remember who I am’ became his motto. It was a sort of naive belief, but we felt that his fierce conviction that it was true made it so.”

“ ‘I am just one person, but I have power, I remember who I am’ became his motto. It was a sort of naive belief, but we felt that his fierce conviction that it was true made it so.”

Milk’s messianic drive is what Gockley calls the opera’s “Moses element.” He notes that “both the Jewish and the liturgical element are interwoven into the piece. The irony that Harvey discovers, in the first act, that he can stand up for himself as a Jew but not as a gay man is the thing that prompts his transformation from the closet to activation.”

The Moses metaphor continues throughout Milk’s life. His journey to Castro Street is a migration to the promised land. Like Moses, he never achieved complete liberation himself, but he left the possibility of it for his followers. A Kaddish, the hymnal prayer for the dead, begins and ends the piece.

Wallace further points out that everyone in the opera, not just Milk, has an ethnic identity, and that became a key to his approach to musical identification. Dan White, for instance, is Irish American, and although his music is not directly Irish, Wallace describes White as singing with an Irish lilt, while underneath it the musical line changes all the time, harmonies shifting from major to minor, to create a feeling of unease.

Wallace says that he found Milk’s character an especially tricky one. “There are two Harvey Milks,” he continues, “one public and one private, so he became a multilayered problem. I defined his private music, the music of his soul, the essence of him, with harmonic roots that stay consistent, because they grow.

“On the other hand, the public Harvey Milk changes. In the closet scene, the music evokes the historic period and Milk’s emotional state through crooning almost like Bing Crosby; Milk’s three lovers sing almost like the Supremes. It is a dark act, and the second (which opens with Dan White, a fireman, fretting over the way the Castro has changed since his boyhood) begins dark as well.

“But when Harvey Milk appears in the Castro, the cake comes out, the party starts, and there is ‘70s disco, which I am not very fond of. Actually, that is a period of music that I really loathe and did not want to use it. But I used a James Brown, funk backbeat as representing joy, unbridled energy, and Harvey Milk as a person that I would want to get involved with. Here Harvey Milk appears and the whole thing takes off.”

Not only will there be two Harvey Milks, but there will be two “Harvey Milks,” as well. The idea for an opera about Harvey Milk was suggested to David Gockley by the highly controversial stage director John Dew, then head of the Bielefeld Opera in Germany.

Dew originally had in mind a musical, which Gockley describes as “very, very weird, with strange dreamlike drag ballets and the like. He had a distorted idea of the subject. However, I also thought it was of operatic potential, and suggested Stewart and Michael who were looking for the subject of their next opera.”

Gockley’s relationship with Dew deteriorated when Gockley brought Dew to Houston to stage Robert Moran’s opera, “Desert of Roses,” and the director’s work proved unacceptable to the composer and the company. And without Dew, “Harvey Milk” then took a more traditionally operatic path.

Gockley says that stage director Christopher Alden has chosen to stage the work “straight, as opposed to putting a kind of personal slant on it. The scenic context is very simple, very abstract. The set, designed by Paul Steinberg, consists of a steep raked pink triangle, high walls which are perforated by doors that can be closet doors, office doors, doors to homes in the Castro district. A large window in the opposite side serves as a place for images, icons and projections.” Alden’s production will be also be seen in New York and San Francisco.

Nonetheless, Dew will present his own production of the opera this spring at the Dortmund Opera in Germany, which he now heads.

So undoubtedly “Harvey Milk” will be attention-getting in Germany as well. But Milk, himself, had a flamboyant talent for stage business, which he turned into a technique for getting press. One of his successful campaigns was to require dog owners to clean up after their pets on San Francisco streets. To publicize the proposed legislation he contrived to step in some specially planted dog doo at an outdoor photo opportunity.

Or as Korie has Scott Jones, Harvey Milk’s lover, say to Milk, a lifelong opera fan, just before he is assassinated: “You never dreamed of this / at the back of the old Met.”