Anne Ewers was the first to have the dream.
"When I interviewed for the job, in the fall of 1990," the Utah Opera general director recalls, "one of the mandates from the board was they wanted to see more national visibility for the company, and they wanted more funding from the National Endowment for the Arts."Well, with my having served on a number of NEA panels, I realized that unless the company did some things on the cutting edge the NEA would not be responsive. Then within a week of my arrival in the spring of 1991 I heard there was a state centennial coming up and I thought, `This is the perfect hook.' "
The result is "Dreamkeepers," Utah Opera's first commissioned opera, which will have its premiere Saturday, Jan. 13, at 7:30 p.m. at the Capitol Theatre. (Additional performances will follow at 7:30 p.m. Jan. 15, 17 and 19 and at 2 p.m. Jan. 21.) And the way Ewers tells it, everything the company has done in the intervening years has been with this goal in sight.
"It has really shaped the entire company," she maintains. "First we restructured the board to build the company to the financial level on which it now sits. We restructured the staff to make it a smooth-running engine. We created our Young Artists Program because we had to workshop the piece and couldn't do it without an ensemble program of some sort. And it's also why we started to do our own set construction, as with "A Masked Ball," because we knew that with this piece we were going to have to create our own sets and I wanted us to have the experience before we did this one."
She also wanted local audiences to have some experience with unfamiliar operas. That meant staging things like the Britten parable operas in conjunction with the Madeleine Festival and doing works like "Salome" as part of the regular season, "so we weren't all of a sudden coming in with a world premiere and no one was used to anything other than Verdi and Puccini."
It also meant choosing the right subject, the right composer and the right librettist. And in this case the last came first, in the person of local poet and playwright Aden Ross.
Ewers admits that's not the usual sequence. "I think the reason I did it was the feeling that part of the team had to be from Salt Lake. And all the work of Aden's I had seen and read made her the obvious choice. Take `K-Mille,' which I saw at Salt Lake Acting Company. The writing style is so taut. There's not a word or a phrase that doesn't make a poignant statement, and I knew that was going to be crucial for an opera libretto."
She also knew the composer had to be a good match, recalling an earlier project at Boston Lyric Opera "in which the composer and librettist were literally at each other's throats." And that led her to San Francisco's David Carlson.
"I think it was Stewart Robertson, the conductor, who mentioned David," Ewers says, "so we phoned him and had him send some tapes, and I was immediately taken by the music. It had passion, romance and melodies along with interesting harmonic structures and powerful orchestrations. So we flew him in, along with the other two finalists, during the summer of '92. Well, David and Aden had already been together five minutes by the time I got to the meeting and there was no question this was the right team."
"The magnetism was instantaneous," Carlson says of that first encounter with Ross. "I remember thinking, `This is a friend for life.' " And apparently the feeling was mutual.
"I could tell right away that this was going to be an extraordinary collaboration," Ross recalls. In fact, she says, "we're already talking about our next opera."
First, however, there is this one. And as those who have attended any of the preview samplings can attest, "Dreamkeepers" is not your typical Utah opera.
"I told Anne at the beginning that I didn't want to write a pioneer story," Ross declares, "and she was thrilled. She said, `It's been done, and we want to do something very different.' Also, both she and David wanted to contribute something to the repertoire and the larger world of opera. That may sound self-interested, but why go to all this trouble and expense for a work that will die in its native land?"
Hence the story they came up with is about the earlier inhabitants of Utah - indeed the people from whom the state took its name - the Utes. Not as they were then, though, but as they are today, embodying the conflicts of old and new and the challenge of preserving their traditions in a changing world.
The central figure is Ela Colorow, a young Ute woman who wants to become a veterinarian but has returned to the reservation because her grandmother, a spiritual healer, is dying. There she encounters Adam Wade, the white doctor with whom she had fallen in love the year before, and the domineering government agent, Sloane. Adam subsequently is involved in an auto accident that leaves him unconscious, and Ela, at her grandmother's prompting, enters the spirit world to save him.
Ross acknowledges the parallels to the Orpheus myth, but says she was even more interested in the motifs of healing and bridging.
"Of course I see it as a story about a contemporary Ute wo-man," she says, "but mainly as a larger story about anyone who is caught between cultures. I think any thinking individual is caught between value systems and organizations that tell us how to live, and at some point we have to say how many of these ideas are right for us and how many won't work in the 21st century."
Interestingly Carlson faced some of the same problems in the music.
"The medicine metaphor really appealed to me and I liked the Orpheus allusions," he says. "Anything with the magical or mystical in it is going to appeal to a composer. I also wanted to incorporate elements of Ute Indian music into the piece. But when I studied their folk tunes or listened to their tapes, I realized they were basically pentatonic - corresponding to the black keys on the keyboard - as opposed to my music, which is basically diatonic. And every time I tried to work them into a chromatic tonal idiom they would cancel each other out."
The upshot was that Carlson spent a year just thinking about the problem before arriving at a twofold solution. "First I decided to use little tiny bits of melodic phrases and rhythmic fragments in the score. Then I decided to use Ute instruments alongside Western instruments in the orchestra."
Examples of that, he says, include "the wonderful moment when Ela realizes her deepest spirituality and ethnic identity in Act 2 and we have a long, sustained chord in the strings, then over that is played a recording of a river-cane flute. Then in the finale you hear an F sharp major chord plus a Ute rasp sort of going berserk."
Ironically, the finished product is a score in which Stewart Robertson - who not only conducted the premiere of Carlson's last opera, "The Midnight Angel," in St. Louis but will be directing the premiere of "Dreamkeepers" - believes the composer has "essentially found his voice."
"It's a warmer score than `Midnight Angel,' " Robertson observes, "probably a result of its being a love story. But it's also the one work where he is clearly consistent from beginning to end, where there is a stylistic integrity from first note to last."
As it turns out, the Utes themselves had a hand in that integrity, in terms of both the music and the libretto.
"They first approached me around a year and a half ago," recalls Ute Tribe public relations director Larry Cesspooch, "asking if I would be interested in taking a look at a Ute opera libretto. At that point it was sort of a mishmash of native-people thinking - part Hopi, part Navajo, part Ute, all these different things. So I said, `Yeah, I'll say something about it.' "
There followed further meetings and discussions with tribal leaders as well as the enlistment of various consultants in such areas as costume design, staging and choreography.
Changes to the libretto involved the lead character's name (originally she had been called Carrie Strongblood) and the elimination of some material deemed "spiritually sensitive" by the tribe.
"I knew the medicine bag was sacred," Ross says of a scene in which Ela's grandmother was shown passing it on to her granddaughter, "but I didn't realize we shouldn't even see it." A similar objection was raised to Carlson's use of what was originally an eagle-bone flute. "They said, `You use that whistle to call the eagle.' "
As for the result, Cesspooch says that "given the time limits, I think it's the best we can do." He also credits Utah Opera for taking the initiative and approaching the tribe in the first place. "They've gone further in that direction than anyone else in my experience," he says, adding that the basic story line isn't that far from reality.
"We actually had a doctor end up with a tribal girl. Those sorts of things happen here."
What really impresses him, though, is the very thing its creators were aiming for, namely the opera's universality. "It's just humanity," he says. "We all cry when we love someone. It's what we feel that matters, not what we see."
Ewers agrees. "This journey that Ela travels toward selfhood," she insists, "is in many ways a reflection of my own journey. I think of that wonderful scene when Ela is thrashing around in the river, fighting it, and her grandmother says, `Sing yourself around the stones.' Instead of confronting, battling and clinging to rocks, we learn to flow down the river, to allow things rather than trying to control them. For me, that's a real struggle."
At present Tulsa Opera is already committed to picking up the work, for their 50th anniversary season in 1997-98. "They have 54 different Native American tribes in that area," Ewers explains, "and were delighted to have it, so they don't have them all fighting over which one should be represented." Inquiries, she says, have also come from other companies in this country and Canada, "so there are people interested in this piece having a life after here."
The cast for this week's Utah premiere includes soprano Juliana Gondek, substituting for Ann Panagulias, as Ela. (Gondek was recently featured in another world premiere, of the opera "Harvey Milk," in Houston, New York and San Francisco.) Tonio di Paolo returns to Utah Opera in the tenor role of Adam, with baritone Brian Montgomery ("The Ghosts of Versailles") as Sloane and mezzo-soprano Debria Brown ("The Passion of Jonathan Wade") as Grandmother.
Ewers is stage director for the production, with sets by Michael E. Downs and costumes by Susan Mem-mott Allred and Fabian Jenks. Choreography is by Roland McCook and Paul Andrews. David Berger has prepared the chorus.
A few single tickets remain, priced from $12 to $45, with turn-backs available each night a half-hour before curtain time.
For information call 355-ARTS.