An ‘Electro-Acoustic’ Opera at the Kennedy Center
By • April 17, 2025 0 319
“Passion, obsession, betrayal, love, death. The story of Steve Jobs is animated by big, human thematics that resonate throughout opera history,” said composer Mason Bates. “Sometimes folks will suggest similar subjects — Elon Musk, Thomas Edison — to which I have to reply, ‘interesting, but not an opera.’”
Between Friday, May 2, and Saturday, May 10, Washington National Opera will present five evening performances and one Sunday matinee of “The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs” by Bates and librettist Mark Campbell, which premiered at the Santa Fe Opera in 2017. The Kennedy Center presentation is a revival, directed by Rebecca Herman, of a production originally staged by Tomer Zvulun of Atlanta Opera. Guest conductor Lidiya Yankovskaya will lead the WNO Orchestra and Chorus.
Pre-performance talks will begin one hour prior. After the Sunday, May 4, performance, WNO Director of Production Chelsea Dennis will moderate a Q&A; Senior Manager of Artistic Planning & Operations Giuliana Zanoni will do the same on Monday, May 5. The Friday, May 9, performance will feature four Cafritz Young Artists, including Jonathan Patton as Jobs, who died in 2011 at age 56 from a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor.
Jobs’s passion for and obsession with digital devices of elegant simplicity are gospel to Apple devotees (fanboys, iSheep). Readers of Walter Isaacson’s 2011 authorized biography and viewers of the 2013 and 2015 Jobs biopics — starring, respectively, Ashton Kutcher and Michael Fassbender — will know of the betrayal to which Bates refers: of Chrisann Brennan, mother of Jobs’s daughter Lisa (he denied paternity for years), and of Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak (whom he cheated early on and to some extent froze out). All have published their own books.
That Jobs was both a visionary and a (pardon the expression) prick, who became less of the latter under the influence of spiritual mentor Kōbun Chino Otogawa, wife Laurene Powell-Jobs and a fatal illness, is the opera’s subtext. The parentheses signal that “The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs” is a tale of two transformations: one technological and the other personal.
John Moore as Steve Jobs in “The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs.” Courtesy Washington National Opera.
Lasting about an hour and a half, the one-act work shuffles some 20 brief scenes, including flashbacks and dream sequences. Looming vertical structures are positioned as screens for projected images; more images flash on grids of monitors.
Played by baritone John Moore in the WNO production, Jobs sings duets with Woz, played by tenor Jonathan Burton, in the famous garage where it all began, and with Brennan, soprano Kresley Figueroa, as they drop LSD in an apple (!) orchard. Tentpole moments: Jobs’s 1985 firing; his Jan. 9, 2007, public introduction of the iPhone at MacWorld; and the Buddhist ceremony at Yosemite’s Ahwahnee Hotel at which he married Powell, played by mezzo-soprano Winona Martin, in 1991.
That ceremony was conducted by Otogawa, a Soto Zen priest from Tassajara Buddhist Center in Carmel, California. Reviewing the opera’s Santa Fe premiere, Anne Midgette wrote in the Washington Post that bass Wei Wu, who also plays Otogawa in the WNO production, “almost stole the show. Familiar to Washington audiences from his years in the Domingo-Cafritz program and repeated appearances since, he seems to have realized his considerable potential, singing with a rich gorgeous sound that never flagged, backed up by a twinkle in his eye that made this character a delight.”
Others in the cast: baritone Justin Burgess as Jobs’s adoptive father Paul and mezzo-soprano Michelle Mariposa as “Teacher.”
During Otagawa’s appearances, the score takes on Asian colors, notably Tibetan singing bowls and low flutes. Elsewhere there are echoes of Bernstein’s jazzy orchestrations and Glass’s minimalist ones. Jobs’s favorite classical composer, Bach, and his sometime instrument, acoustic guitar, are referenced. Most distinctive in Bates’s keyboard-supported, “electro-acoustic” score is the use of beats and legacy Macintosh sounds, played on laptop.
The weeklong run — following presentations in Bloomington, Indiana (at IU’s Jacobs School of Music), Seattle, Kansas City, Atlanta, Calgary, Salt Lake City and San Francisco — brings Bates back to the Kennedy Center, where he was the first composer-in-residence and launched the new-music series KC Jukebox.
Known for writing pieces that seamlessly integrate amplified instruments and synthesized tracks with traditional strings, winds and percussion, Bates, 48, grew up in Richmond and Newtown, Virginia. While completing a B.A. in English and an M.M. in composition in the joint Columbia University-Juilliard School program, he studied with composers Samuel Adler, John Corigliano and David Del Tredici.
He went on to earn a Ph.D. in composition at the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies at the University of California, Berkeley, winning Rome and Berlin Prizes and a Guggenheim Fellowship along the way. Meanwhile, he performed in San Francisco as a DJ and techno artist under the handle Masonic. Since 2014, he has been on the San Francisco Conservatory of Music composition faculty.
Commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera in 2018, Bates’s second opera, “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” with a libretto by Gene Scheer based on the Michael Chabon novel, will premiere at the Met in September.
Asked about audience reactions to “The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs” in different cities, Bates cited “the particular resonance” of the performances by San Francisco Opera in the fall of 2023. “The tech-heavy audience responded with an electricity that was both fun and moving.”
