In Scene 1 Uliana and the Narrator tell how
Uliana’s Russian-Jewish parents emigrated to
Kansas: “The Messiah was Papa’s socialist
farming Commune.”
Uliana grows up in Kansas in Scene 2 amid tornadoes
and piano lessons. She is a child prodigy who soon turns
to musical composition. In the 1920s she moves to Chicago
to further her studies.
In Scene 3 Uliana contends with societal strictures
against women musicians. She sings a satirical duet with
Gustave Kerker, in fact a musical director of the period,
who felt that “women must play only the harp”
in orchestras.
Scenes 4 and 5 find Uliana in the midst of the
avant-garde movement and married to Boris, a surrealist
poet-painter. But Boris cannot cope with Uliana’s
budding success, and they decide to get “a very
very friendly divorce.”
Scene 6 is a video sequence first of the Great
Depression, and then of Midwest dust bowls, as Uliana
narrates, “A bowl of black dust was the only
panorama, when Kansas blew to Louisiana.”
Scenes 7 and 8 take place during the Depression years.
Uliana marries second husband Tommy, a union organizer.
She changes her compositional style, writes marches and
songs for the workers, and gets help from the New Deal.
“My first commission, and from the USA. Equal money
for women artists, never thought I’d live to see
the day.” But then Tommy lands a better job and
wants Uliana to give up her career and “be all you
can be a housewife to me.” She sadly leaves him,
commenting, “So there are still two worlds, One for
lullabies and for recipes, the other for affairs of
state. One to charm and nurture, the other to devise and
create”
Scene 9 continues this theme with a conversation
between Gustave and Alma Mahler, as Uliana watches from
the wings. “This is incomprehensible!” Mahler
tells Alma. “Who can picture married life between
two composers!…Ridiculous! Degrading! …Give
up your music to posses mine instead.” (The music
for this section is freely adapted from a song by Alma
Mahler. The text is derived from letters of Alma and
Gustave on the eve of their marriage.)
Scene 10 begins with a video sequence of modern dance
from the late 1930s, performed to Uliana’s music.
Suddenly the music is drowned out by sirens and cannon
fire, and a film sequence on World War II replaces the
dance footage, as Uliana and her GI husband Ben watch
horrified (Scene 11).
Scene 12 begins uptempo with the war effort:
“Women in the factories, riveting fast,” and
ends with the explosion of the atomic bomb.
Scene 13 finds Uliana a war widow and in political
trouble. It’s the 1950s, the McCarthy era, and she
is blacklisted for those workers’ songs from the
1930s. Joe, husband number 4, turns out to be an FBI
informer.
Happier times return in Scene 14 as Uliana is courted
by a hippy and swept up into the Peace Corps and the
Civil Rights movement. In Scene 15, she has won the
Pulitzer Prize and is reunited with Tommy, now working to
save the environment. Tommy has seen the light, and tells
Uliana, “So you did become all you could be, by
living for everyone, not only for me.” Uliana
declares, “Tommy, my heart never changed.”
The lovers decide to remarry and to have a child,
although Uliana is now in her eighties. They are joined
by the rest of the cast, who end the opera singing Primo
Levi’s words, “Time can make us famous, time
can make us fools, and so the best aim is to live by
compassion’s rules.”