ROOTABAGA COUNTRY BACKGROUND NOTES
About Rootabaga Country, By Rachel J. Peters
Since my middle school days in Missouri, I have felt a kindred spirit in Carl Sandburg's writing. With Rootabaga Stories, he struck an uncanny balance of silliness and profundity, resulting in a tone and landscape like nothing 1 have witnessed yet in the youth opera repertoire. The delightfully odd characters and their shenanigans comprise a world that feels familiar yet reaches far beyond our everyday experience. From the Potato Face Blind Man's accordion-accompanied life lessons to Henry
Hagglyhoagly's frozen guitar serenade, so much music already lives in these tales that it is impossible not to imagine it while reading them. I can think of no better vehicle than opera to introduce this uniquely American literary master and folk hero to a new generation.
Sandburg did not create a mother for the children in his book, which led me to think about unofficial families. If we are lucky enough to share a connection with anyone, then we probably have them. Beyond blood relations, my own unofficial family of friends and colleagues has transformed my life in ways 1 never thought possible. At a time when just being a kid trying to grow up is more confusing than ever before, whether or not our Alelias are there with us, it is vital to remember that family truly is 'anybody rooting for each other/when the world is cattywompus'. This opera is dedicated to official and unofficial families everywhere. I humbly thank everyone at Sarasota Opera for bringing it to life so magically.
Rachel J. Peters, Composer and Librettist
Rachel J. Peters’ broad array of work encompasses several genres including opera, musical theater, concert work, art songs, and cabaret. Operas: The Wild Beast of the Bungalow with Royce Vavrek (Center for Contemporary Opera), Companionship (Manhattan School of Music) Pie, Pith, and Palette with Marvin J. Carlton (The Atlanta Opera), and Monkey Do (Rhymes With Opera). Musicals: Only Children with Michael R. Jackson (NYU Tisch Mainstage), Tiny Feats of Cowardice with Susan Bernfield (NYC Fringe Festival), Write Left with John Walch ( Playwrights Horizons Theatre School), Tomato Red (UC Irvine), Octopus Heart (NYU Steinhardt). Concert works: Ethel Smyth Plavs Golf in Limbo (Semperoper Dresden), Jack’s Vocabulary (Hartt SPASM), I Live Here (Galapagos Art Space), Canon I (Two Sides Sounding), And Then (BayPath College), Fronds: The Wisdom of Fanny Fern (The Walt Whitman Project). Scores for plays: Stretch (a fantasia) (New Georges), Tania in the Getaway Van (Flea Theater) by Susan Bernfield, Transatlantic by John Walch (Arkansas Rep), and The Bacchae (Asolo Rep Conservatory).
Her songs have been performed at Lincoln Center, Second Stage, The National Opera Center, Sumnhony Space, NYMF, Ars Nova, Joe's Pub, and cabarets and theatres nationwide. She is a proud contributor to the new generation of The AIDS Quilt Songbook. Fellowships and residencies: Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, New Dramatists Composer- Librettist Studio, American Opera Projects' Composers and the Voice, and John Duffy Composers Institute. Rachel holds a double B.A. summa cum laude from Brandeis University and an MFA from New York University.
Carl Sandburg, Author
Author-poet Carl Sandburg was born the second of seven children on January 6, 1878 to Swedish immigrants August and Clara. He quit school following his graduation from eighth grade and spent a decade working a variety of jobs – barbershop porter, milk truck driver, brickyard hand, and a harvester in the Kansas wheat fields - before traveling as a hobo in 1897.
When the Spanish-American War broke out in 1898 Sandburg volunteered for service and at the age of twenty was ordered to Puerto Rico. Upon his return to his hometown of Galesburg, Illinois, he entered Lombard College while supporting himself as an on-call fireman. As the first decade of the century wore on, he grew increasingly concerned with the plight of the American worker. In 1907 he served as an organizer for the Wisconsin Social Democratic Party during which he met Lilian Steichen, whom he married in 1908.
Sandburg was virtually unknown in 1914 when a group of his poems appeared in Poetry magazine. Two years later his book Chicago Poems was published, and the thirty-eight-year-old author found himself on the brink of a career that would bring him international acclaim. More works followed including Rootabaga Stories (1922), a book of fanciful children’s tales, his two-volume Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years, and his four-volume Abraham Licoln: The War Years, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1940. He received a second Pulitzer Prize in 1951for Complete Poems.
Carl Sandburg died at his North Carolina home July 22, 1967.
