The composition of the opera was started by Marc Blitzstein, and was commissioned by the Ford Foundation and optioned by the Metropolitan Opera. It remained unfinished at the time of his death in 1964, and Leonard Lehrman took on the task of completing the work. The libretto draws entirely from primary source material such as interviews with the defendants, letters, witness testimony, and trial transcripts in the infamous case of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. Over the decades their tale of arrest, conviction, their execution, and their eventual exoneration, have come to stand as a chilling reminder of the devastating course that intolerance for unpopular political views and xenophobia can take.
The production is quite long – three hours in total. It is entirely in English, with the exception of one scene early on which is in Italian. The entire production is subtitled, but do take the time to read the introduction to Sacco and Vanzetti, excerpted here below from the program, as well as the synopsis of the opera which is attached in a pdf file below.
Excerpts from Introduction to Sacco and Vanzetti – from program notes by Leonard Lehrman
Early in the morning of December 24, 1919, a group of men tried and failed, to hold up a shoe company payroll truck in Bridgewater, Massachusetts.
On April 15, 1920, five men succeeded in robbing the payroll of another shoe company, in nearly South Braintree. Making their getaway, they shot and killed the paymaster and a guard, Frederick Parmenter and Alessandro m Berardelli. All the witnesses said the killers looked like foreigners. Brockton Police Chief Michael Stewart was convinced that the same men had been involved in both crimes.
Three weeks later, he found his suspects: five Italian immigrants who were also labor-organizing anarchists, and therefore candidates for deportation during the post-war Red Scare. They were arrested when they were spotted trying to retrieve an old car that had been left for repair at the Elm Square Garage in West Bridgewater. Three of them, though, Mike Boda, Ferruccio Coacci, and Riccardo Oriciani, turned out to have iron-clad alibis. That left Nicola Sacco, a worker in a shoe factory, and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, a fish peddler.
Their case, prosecuted by District Attorney Frederick Katzmann before Judge Webster Thayer, would drag through the courts for seven years, provoking a worldwide outcry at the injustice of the conviction, sentencing, and execution. The story would haunt Marc Blitzstein for most of his life. His un-produced choral opera of 1932, The Condemned, was based on the case, as was the opera you’re about to hear, which he began on a Ford Foundation commission for the Metropolitan Opera in 1960, but left unfinished at the time of his death in 1964.
