Presidential Scandal Goes to the Opera

“If there was ever an American story that was meant to be an opera, it was this one,” says composer Glenn Paxton. “The story of Thomas Jefferson is just fraught with all the themes of great opera.”

What he’s referring to is the founding father’s contradictory public and private views of slavery. Jefferson thought it was an abomination, yet something that could not be abolished without rending the fabric of the young republic. And then there was the matter of the slaves he used to run his plantation, Monticello, near Charlottesville, Va. He remained a slaveholder until his death in 1826.

The contradiction was perhaps most acute in his 40-year relationship with Sally Hemings, a mulatto who was in fact half-sister to his wife, Martha, who died in her 30s. The nature of that relationship and the charge that Hemings was Jefferson’s mistress has long been debated, but recent DNA research has found a convincing link between the descendants of the Jefferson and Hemings families.

And now it has become the subject of an opera, with libretto by Leroy Aarons and score by Paxton, which will be presented in a concert version by L.A. Theatre Works at the Skirball Cultural Center starting this week (and later broadcast on KCRW).

The idea for the work originated with Aarons, who is a career journalist, former executive editor of the Oakland Tribune, a novelist and nonfiction author, and a founding member of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Assn. Four years ago he came across “Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History” (published in 1974) by UCLA history professor Fawn Brodie, which analyzed the link between Jefferson and Hemings. Brodie provided evidence that five of Hemings’ children could have been Jefferson’s, and traced the scandal unleashed in 1802 when a tabloid accused Jefferson, then in the second year of his presidency, of having a slave for his mistress.

It was the Clinton-Lewinsky sizzle of its day, trumpeted in print, parodies and rallies. Refusing to comment, Jefferson stayed above the brouhaha, and the story died, but never entirely.

Long an opera buff, Aarons immediately saw the possibilities. “Here were all these kids who looked like him [Jefferson], but no one talked about it,” he says. “All of a sudden this big scandal erupts, and this genteel Southern obfuscation blew up. . . . Imagine what must have happened during this period--and you’ve got an opera!”

After doing his own research, Aarons sat down to write “Monticello.” It came “very easily,” he says.

That was not the case for his intended collaborator, who suffered a “musical block,” according to the writer. Then a theater friend put him in contact with Glenn Paxton, an Ojai-based composer who has scored orchestral and choral works as well as several musicals.

The two hit it off, and last year Paxton put music to the words, inspired in part by blues and gospel music, as well as contemporary opera scores.

A personal relationship brought “Monticello” together with L.A. Theatre Works as well. The group, which produces the 11-year-old radio series “The Play’s the Thing” for KCRW, had presented “Top Secret: The Battle for the Pentagon Papers,” a docudrama co-written by Aarons, in 1991. Susan Albert Loewenberg, LATW producing director, was on the hunt for an opera to include in the radio series when she heard her old friend had one in the can. “I immediately picked up the phone,” she said.

After listening to a preliminary run-through of “Monticello,” Loewenberg made Paxton and Aarons her usual offer: a professional cast and crew, a short run of live concert-style performances (no staging, costumes, sets or the like) and a recording (the radio series is available on CD and tape).

The cast for “Monticello” includes up-and-coming singers such as Christopher Schuman (as Jefferson), who has a background in contemporary opera; Shana Blake Hill (as Hemings), who will become a resident artist at Los Angeles Opera next season; and Cynthia Jansen (as Jefferson’s daughter Patsy), who was awarded first prize at the 1999 Metropolitan Opera National Council Western Regional Auditions and also joins L.A. Opera next season as a resident artist. The director is actor-pianist John Rubinstein; Victoria Kirsch is music director and provides piano accompaniment.

“Sometime later, one hopes this opera will have a life with full staging,” says Loewenberg, echoing a sentiment shared by the principal creators.

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Act 1 of “Monticello” explores the furor that might have occurred in the Jefferson household as the scandal raged in 1803. It opens with a sly ditty penned 200 years ago to the tune of “Yankee Doodle”: “Of all the damsels on the green/On mountain or in valley/A lass so luscious ne’er was seen/As Monticellian Sally. . . .”

In the opera, Sally, who has been living in the master’s house with a back staircase to his bedroom, is none too happy with her sudden notoriety. James, her brother and a freed man, has come to persuade her to demand her freedom from Jefferson and go away with him. She replies with a woman’s time-honored rationalization: “I know that he needs me/No ordinary slave, I’m special in his eyes.”

Act 2 takes place 23 years later, as Jefferson lies on his deathbed. Sally reminds him of his promise to free his slaves, but instead he justifies their sale to pay off the substantial debts of Monticello. He says that he is sorry, to which Sally responds in song, “Sorry ain’t big enough/Sorry ain’t wide enough.” While she is kept on by Patsy and later freed to join her son Madison, she must watch as the other slaves are sent away to be sold.

Aarons says that very little is known about Sally Hemings, the pivotal character in “Monticello.” He exercised artistic license and his imagination, he says, searching “for what may be some kind of inner truth.”

“What I was trying to do was to look at these events through the scrim of the slave himself, whose history was barely recorded in those years.”

Hill, as Sally, has also had to use her imagination along with historical research. An Oberlin-trained singer who, like Sally, is of mixed race, Hill has read both fact and fiction about the character and has gained an image of Jefferson’s mistress as smart and beautiful, a woman who did the best she could under the oppressive circumstances.

In the opera Sally’s mother Betty sees to it that despite the difficulties of the present, her daughter understands that she had a dignified past, descended from African royalty.

“There was no question if you had a beautiful daughter that she would be someone’s mistress and protected--or else continually raped by white men,” Hill says. “It’s interesting to think that if I’d been alive during that time, that’s the life I would have led, too.”

Originally from North Carolina, Hill believes that the South has yet to reconcile itself with its history of slavery and miscegenation.

For Aarons, who is white, the story also has a present-day relevance. He believes that it addresses the contradiction in America between the dream and the reality.

‘We’re still conflicted between our picture of America as the ideal of equality,” he says, “and the reality for people of color and others who don’t have it.”

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“Monticello,” Wednesday-Friday, 8 p.m., next Sunday, 2 p.m., and 7:30 p.m., Skirball Cultural Center, 2701 N. Sepulveda Blvd. $36, $32, student rush $10, (310) 827-0889.