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With a Little Help
Student composes his own opera
By Marcel Smith
MAY 15, 2000:
A current TV ad reminds us that sometimes things just come
together. That's exactly what happened recently at Eakin
Elementary, when the school gave two performances of an opera written by
one of its sixth-grade students, Evan Broder. It's noteworthy that a
student this young would want to write an opera, doing both the libretto
and the music himself. It's even more noteworthy that the opera is really
pretty good, and that the school came together in a complex collaboration
to bring the opera to life in the school's auditorium.
Eakin Elementary has been around for a while; it doesn't boast a
state-of-the-art physical plant. As a venue for a world premiere, the
school auditorium is pretty shabby. But what happened there was vital and
delightful.
Evan Broder is an uncommonly bright and talented child, refreshingly
courteous, quietly self-confident, and an easy conversationalist. He's
interested in computers and is already doing some programming. He's also
interested in drama: As a class project last year, Evan and a team of
classmates did a play on the Holocaust, finding in it analogies with the
American Civil War, which the class was studying at that time.
Needless to say, Broder is also very much interested in music. He plays
several instruments--piano, violin, and his favorite, the viola--and he's a
chorister with the Boychoir at the Blair School of Music. He has a special
interest in opera, maybe because it combines drama with music. Many
Nashvillians have seen and heard him on the Nashville Opera stage. Two
years ago, when he was 9, he had a major singing role as one of the doomed
children in Britten's opera Turn of the Screw, and he distinguished
himself both as actor and as singer. In last season's Nashville Opera
finale, Der Rosenkavalier, he was one of some half-dozen children in
the cast. He already has a lot of experience as a public performer in opera
and performs with secure confidence.
Given the opportunity to do an extracurricular assignment at school,
Broder characteristically opted to do something out of the ordinary: He
sought and got permission to write an opera. What's more, he was
essentially given artistic control of his opus; he wrote the book and the
music, he directed the staging, and he sang the meatiest role himself. The
student composer based his libretto on a Chinese legend that tells how
Earth once had 10 suns and would have burned to a cinder if the Emperor of
the East hadn't ordered the suns destroyed. But as the emperor's archer
shot the suns out of the sky, one by one, the ruler recognized that if all
10 were destroyed, life on Earth would vanish for lack of light and heat.
Accordingly, one sun was saved at the last minute, and the other nine
morphed into raucously brilliant crows.
It's a charming fable. And what Broder does with it--in a work that runs
about 10 minutes--is charming as well. The libretto is less successful than
the music, but it does present the basic story pretty efficiently. The one
really demanding singing role is the narrator, sung quite effectively by
Broder himself. The other parts are in fewer and shorter passages that can
be sung by first-graders. (Evan's younger brother Aaron sang the Emperor of
the East.) The working out of the action brought some two dozen
singer/actors onto the stage and required a couple changes of scene.
Amazingly, all this was handled with remarkable efficiency, so that the
fable moved along cogently.
This colorful busyness would have engaged the audience of parents,
grandparents, siblings, and classmates, even if the music had been done
with one Oriental lute or a guitar. But in fact, the music was remarkably
sophisticated, scored (thanks to computer software) for a dozen string
players and piano. All but two of the string musicians were Eakin
sixth-graders. The music had a suitably Oriental color and texture,
effectively exploiting both bowed and pizzicatto sounds. The opera opened
with an overture and closed with a postlude. In between, the narrator, the
10 suns, the emperor and his archer, and the dying human population whom
the archer rescues sang attractively shaped melodies marked by some subtle
syncopations. And though the orchestra's players were not from St. Martin
in the Fields, they played quite capably.
Broder's opera is a bona fide artistic product, but even given his book
and score, the opera would not have been possible without a lot of
cooperation from his school. The sixth-grade string players, taught and
conducted by Caroline Terranova, gave up part of their spring break and all
of their PE classes to rehearse. First-grade teacher Celeste Mize devoted a
big part of her class and activity time to preparing the children for their
roles onstage. The school's art department built the ingeniously expressive
scenery, designed so that quick scene changes could be cleverly made. And
four sixth-graders volunteered to serve as the stage crew, responsible for
lighting and changes of scene.
Although a fraction of the nearly full house was adult family who could
be counted on to applaud and bestow bouquets, the majority of the audience
consisted of Broder's classmates, who sounded their spontaneous delight in
what they saw and heard, both during the performance and in enthusiastic
applause at the end. Broder and his school can take deserved pride in what
they accomplished together.
To all indications, this precocious 11-year-old can look forward to more
creative successes as he pursues his interest in music and drama. But so
long as Eakin Elementary recognizes and nurtures such talent within its
walls, it too can look forward to other successes, from other students.
Evan Broder's opera was surely a marvelous experience for him, but it was
just as enriching for his collaborators--teachers and students
alike--without whom this opera never would have gotten out of his head and
onto the stage. That's exactly the kind of learning schoolkids need and
deserve.

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