#willard white

Years ago, I used to spend my summers in London. One summer, I got to go to the Barbican Centre and hear the UK premiere of John Adams’ opera-oratorio El Niño, which was written as a kind of Handeleque nativity oratorio for the turn of the new millennium. The texts are drawn from all over the place but especially the Apocrypha and the poetry of the wonderful Mexican poet Rosario Castellanos. At the very end of the work, in a scene that depicts the holy family’s flight to Egypt, Mary (in this case, Dawn Upshaw) complains about being thirsty and hot. The Christ child makes a palm tree bend down to offer shade, and he makes a spring burst forth from the desert floor to offer water. At this point, a small children’s choir, which had not been part of the proceedings hitherto, comes onstage, dressed in street clothes and bright colored t-shirts. They sit and sing a gorgeous setting of Castellanos’ “Una palmera” (”A Palm Tree”) as the orchestra flickers around their voices, the bass (in this case, the extraordinary Willard White) narrates the end of the scene, the strings die out, and all that’s left are the voices of the children with a single acoustic guitar gently strumming accompaniment. In the original staging, which was directed by Peter Sellars, a single female dancer serving as the palm tree sways, as though in the breeze, as the holy family sits and the lights slowly fade out.