‘The Blizzard Voices’ is a lasting story
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By JEFF KORBELIK / Lincoln Journal Star
A Woman’s Voice:
“How the good lord in his
infinite mercy, let those
“The Blizzard Voices”
Opera Omaha
7:30 p.m. Friday at Holland Performing Arts Center in Omaha
7:30 p.m. Saturday at The Arts Center at Iowa Western Community College in Council Bluffs, Iowa
Tickets: Range from $19 to $99; (402) 346-7372 or www.operaomaha.org
Book about storm
For more about the 1888 storm, read Seattle author David Laskin’s nonfiction account, “The Children’s Blizzard” (HarperCollins, 2004).
Laskin chronicles the men, women and children involved in it as well as providing a meticulous account of the storm’s evolution and the struggles of the government forecasters in tracking its progress.
poor little children die,
I’ll never understand.
Not only were there freezings,
but fires. One house in town
burned to the ground
when the wind sucked the flames
up into the chimney,
and one of the boys died
when the roof fell in on him.”
“The Blizzard Voices”
— Ted Kooser
The day — Jan. 12, 1888 — began unusually warm.
Temperatures were in the 20s, just a day after they had plummeted to below zero.
Strange.
Yet people who lived throughout Nebraska, the Dakotas and Minnesota didn’t think much of it.
Instead, they took advantage the unseasonably nice day.
Children walked to school without coats and gloves, and adults ventured from the safety — and warmth — of their homes to do chores or run errands in nearby towns.
But that afternoon, a cold front swept across the Great Plains, bringing with it howling winds, blinding snow and bitter cold.
Temperatures reportedly dropped 18 degrees in three minutes, and continued to fall into evening.
By the next morning, nearly 500 people lay dead across the prairie, including several children caught in the storm on their way home from school.
It’s one of those stories that “still seems to be holding up,” said Ted Kooser, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet from Garland, who published a book of poems, “The Blizzard Voices,” in 1986 about the storm.
“It’s a lasting story,” he said. “In a way, biblical, I think.”
The storm captured his imagination.
He wrote the book of poems and later put together a verse-play that was read in 1988, commemorating the blizzard’s 100th anniversary.
Now, Opera Omaha is taking another step with it.
Fellow Pulitzer winner composer Paul Moravec will premiere his new oratorio, “The Blizzard Voices,” this week at the Holland Performing Arts Center.
He based his piece on Kooser’s book. Opera Omaha is debuting the work as part of its 50th anniversary celebration.
“I had never read a book quite like this in which a poet had taken actual accounts from this direct event that’s not very far removed from us,” Moravec said in a phone interview from New York, where he is a professor at Adelphi University. “What appealed to me was the plainness of the language, the straightforwardness.”
A Man’s Voice:
One man who was lost that day
had been shelling corn, and had gone
to a neighbor’s to borrow
a grain scoop. Halfway home,
he was caught by the storm,
and he left the scoop in the snow
near the road. He wandered
ahead of the wind and was found
that spring when it thawed, twelve miles
southeast of his home.
“The Blizzard Voices”
— Ted Kooser
Over two years in the making, Opera Omaha’s “The Blizzard Voices” results from the creative talents of Kooser, Moravec and Opera Omaha artistic director and conductor Stewart Robertson.
During the initial concept stages, Robertson not only desired to produce a work of great literary and musical significance, but to present the work in a physical format that most powerfully expressed the storm.
“A certain subject matter will demand the evolution of forms and modes of presentation most suited to the expressive intent,” Robertson said in press materials. “Such is the case with Opera Omaha’s project, ‘The Blizzard Voices.’”
Moravec, who won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in Music, has composed more than 90 orchestral, chamber, choral, lyric, film and electro-acoustic compositions.
His music has been described as “riveting and fascinating” (National Public Radio) and “assured, virtuosic” (Wall Street Journal).
Moravec composed “The Blizzard Voices” as an oratorio (concert piece) for six singers, mixed chorus and orchestra.
“It wouldn’t make for a good opera because you don’t have the same characters throughout,” Moravec said. “As an oratorio, it’s perfect.”
Before creating the score, he met Kooser at a downtown Lincoln coffeeshop, where they discussed the verse-play.
For it, Kooser added skip rope rhymes for dramatic and tonal shifts between “stories” and to represent the children.
Moravec has kept that structure and incorporated the rhymes into the oratorio, which will separate poem-stories sung by the soloists.
“I told him him he had complete freedom to do what he wanted to do with it,” Kooser said.
Moravec also has used text from other sources, including a poem from the 20th century.
“It has nothing to do with Nebraska,” he said, “ but I thought it was appropriate.”
As he did with the 1600s lullaby, “Golden Slumbers,” by Thomas Dekker, which The Beatles recorded under the same name in 1969.
Moravec rounded out the oratorio with a few selections from the Bible for context.
“I thought it would be appropriate because the people on the Plains probably were Bible readers,” he said.
For visual effects, Opera Omaha commissioned Watie White, director of the Omaha Print Makers Guild, to provide more than 50 drawings inspired by Kooser’s poetry.
A Man’s Voice:
As the news of the storm got out,
it seems the papers
needed a heroine, someone
to fix in the public eye
as an example of courage
out on the savage prairies.
They chose Minnie Mae Freeman,
a girl in her teens who taught school
in a soddy near Ord ...
“The Blizzard Voices”
— Ted Kooser
In writing “The Blizzard Voices,” Kooser, who won his Pulitzer in 2005 and was U.S. Poet Lauerate from 2004 to 2006, used actual reminisces of those who survived the tragic storm.
His sources were many because the storm is such a significant episode in Nebraska history.
The Nebraska State Capitol, for instance, has an abstract mosaic near the ceiling of the Great Hall depicting one of the teachers, Minnie Mae Freeman, who became known for leading her students through the storm to safety.
Freeman is part of Kooser’s book as well as the oratorio.
In the introduction of “The Blizzard Voices,” Kooser wrote how people in his family, then in their 70s and 80s, recalled the blizzard and talked about their experiences.
“I was bound by their spell as only a child can be,” he wrote. “All my life I have been talking with people about their experiences of the great storm.”
Kooser, of course, is thrilled Opera Omaha is taking on the project. It will be the second time in three years an original theatrical piece has been created from his writings. The Nebraska Repertory Theatre staged “Local Wonders,” starring Lincoln couple David and Melodee Landis, in 2006.
“What interests me about it,” he said, “and continues to interest me is how we associate such things as howling winds with a blizzard. It seems to me music will make (these kind of things) quite interesting.”
What struck Moravec was the drama and emotion he found in Kooser’s poetry.
“These were ordinary people in an extraordinary circumstance,” he said. “They found themselves in the middle of a catastrophe. It wasn’t people just in Nebraska, but throughout the Plains.”
The oratorio may remind many of recent weather-related tragedies, such as Hurricane Katrina and the Iowa floods.
“Something about this reminds me of Katrina,” Moravec said. “In a way it’s worse than Katrina because there was absolutely no warning.”
Like Kooser, Moravec views the 1888 blizzard as a “biblical catastrophe.”
“Like the wrath of God,” he said.
Reach Jeff Korbelik at 473-7213 or jkorbelik@journalstar.com.
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