As History Repeats, So Too Do Resistance and Resilience

Every work of art, every recital, every curated opera season is done with intention. Sometimes that intention may be meeting specific graduation requirements, sometimes it may be a gamle on which titles and names will sell tickets, sometimes it is a program of an artist's favorite works. Rising Waters Collective was founded on the principles of celebrating Pacific Northwest artists, creating immersive experiences for audiences in non-traditional performance spaces, and doing this through the medium of chamber opera.

We program our seasons with the intention of fostering dialogue between our communities and we do not shy away from exploring works that are explicitly political and cultural acts. Many times, it is impossible to separate the two.

With that in mind, let's talk a little about our program for June 27th's She Carries the Fire featuring pianist Elisabeth Ellis, sopranos Holly Boaz, Anjani Briggs, and Ibidunni Ojikutu, mezzo soprano Julia Benzinger, and baritone Morgan Smith.

Sappho: The First Surviving Voice

For She Carries the Fire, we open with Sappho.

Sappho of Lesbos was a Greek poet who lived around 620 to 570 BCE. In ancient times she was widely regarded as one of the greatest lyric poets and was given names such as "the Tenth Muse" and "The Poetess." Plato called her the equal of Homer. Her poems were first collected into nine volumes around the third century BCE but that collection did not endure beyond the 8th or 9th century CE (falling out of fashion in medieval Europe and the rotting of the manuscripts), meaning her work was effectively lost for roughly a thousand years, surviving only in fragments quoted in other authors' texts, on scraps of papyrus discovered in Egyptian garbage dumps, and as lining inside mummy wrappings and papier-mache coffins.

What we have of Sappho exists because her words survived on garbage dumps, in coffin linings, and in quotations buried inside other men's work. Much of her work has been lost, with only fragments surviving, primarily due to historical censorship and the destruction of texts over time. 

Little remains of her work, and the fragments that do remain suggest that she was drawn to other women. Her name inspired the terms "sapphic" and "lesbian," both referencing female same-sex relationships. She wrote about love between women, about desire, longing, beauty, and the body. She called her poetry her "immortal daughters." 

On our concert, twenty-six centuries later, RWC Co-Director Ibidunni Ojikutu will sing Sappho’s words, set to music by Undine Smith Moore.

What we have of Sappho exists because her words survived on garbage dumps, in coffin linings, and in quotations buried inside other men's work. Much of her work has been lost, with only fragments surviving, primarily due to historical censorship and the destruction of texts over time. 

Little remains of her work, and the fragments that do remain suggest that she was drawn to other women. Her name inspired the terms "sapphic" and "lesbian," both referencing female same-sex relationships. She wrote about love between women, about desire, longing, beauty, and the body. She called her poetry her "immortal daughters." 

On our concert, twenty-six centuries later, RWC Co-Director Ibidunni Ojikutu will sing Sappho’s words, set to music by Undine Smith Moore.

Undine Smith Moore: A Voice Nearly Lost

Undine Smith Moore was an American composer and educator who spent decades at Virginia State University training generations of Black musicians. She was born in 1904 and died in 1989. She composed songs, choral works, and piano pieces across a sixty-year career. She was known in her own community as "the Dean of Black Women Composers" but she was largely invisible to the mainstream classical music world for most of her life.

The decision to program Moore alongside Sappho is not an academic choice - a statement about what kinds of voices have been allowed to be preserved and what kinds get lost.

*We will be featuring more about Undine Smith Moore in our next article so stay tuned!

Bainbridge Island: The Argument Arrives in Seattle

The opera An American Dream, composed by Jack Perla with libretto by Jessica Murphy Moo, draws on true stories from Puget Sound's own history. It depicts two intersecting narratives during World War II: a Japanese American family facing incarceration and a German Jewish immigrant preoccupied by those she left behind.

The history it draws from happened eleven miles from where we will present She Carries the Fire.

On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, setting in motion the expulsion of 110,000 Japanese Americans from the West Coast to ten inland prison camps in isolated areas of the country. Two thirds of those imprisoned were US citizens. None was ever accused of any crime or charged or convicted of any act of espionage or sabotage. 

On March 30, 1942, 227 Bainbridge Island men, women, and children, most of them United States citizens, were escorted by armed soldiers to the Eagledale ferry landing. They solemnly boarded the ferry Kehloken and departed on a lonely journey with an unknown destination and fate. They were exiled by Presidential Executive Order 9066 and Civilian Exclusion Order No. 1 because they were Nikkei, persons of Japanese ancestry.

The families had just six days to sell or lease their farms, store their property, find new homes for pets, and say their goodbyes. 

Total property loss is estimated at $1.3 billion, and net income loss at $2.7 billion, calculated in 1983 dollars based on a congressional commission investigation. (Those numbers in 2026, adjusted for inflation, would be around $4.35 billion and 9.03 billion, respectively.)

The Bainbridge Islanders became the first Japanese Americans in the country to be incarcerated under Executive Order 9066. They were followed by 110,000 others.

The memorial at the former Eagledale ferry dock reads: Nidoto Nai Yoni. Let It Not Happen Again.

We are performing music about this history in the summer of 2026, when the United States government is actively detaining immigrants without due process, when families are being separated at borders, when the language of "national security" is being used to justify the removal of people from their communities. The parallel is not subtle. 

Nazi Germany and the Criminalization of Love

Jake Heggie's For a Look or a Touch is a dramatic song cycle based on the true story of Gad Beck and Manfred Lewin, two gay teenagers in Berlin whose lives were torn apart by the Holocaust. The title refers to the law that made their love a crime.

Paragraph 175 was the law that criminalized so-called "unnatural indecency" between two men. It had been on the record since the German Empire in 1871 and was expanded upon and applied with severity during the Nazi regime. In June 1935 the Nazis revised it to expand the category of "criminally indecent activities" to include any act which could be considered homosexual.

Nazi courts convicted approximately 53,000 men on the basis of Paragraph 175, and it is assumed that approximately 10,000 men persecuted as homosexuals were detained in concentration camps. Many men imprisoned for violating Paragraph 175 had to wear a pink triangle identifying them as homosexual in the prisoner classification system. 

Pink triangle prisoners suffered enormous abuse in concentration camps. They often found themselves near the bottom of the camp hierarchy, subject to abuse from both other prisoners and SS guards. Research suggests that "homosexual" prisoners had a very low chance of survival. 

The criminalization of sexual relations between men in Germany did not end with the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945. West Germany consciously chose to continue it, adopting the Nazis' intensified version of Paragraph 175 almost verbatim and launching a systematic persecution that would last for decades. In a devastating 1957 ruling, the Federal Constitutional Court declared the Nazi-era Paragraph 175 compatible with West Germany's new democratic constitution. 

In the 1970s and 1980s, gay activists adopted the pink triangle as a symbol of their movement and reinterpreted it as a positive sign of solidarity. It became a symbol of survival, defiance, and memory. It is still worn today.

We are honored to have baritone Morgan Smith, who performed at the work’s world premiere in Seattle in 2007, performing Golden Years from For a Look or Touch.

The Catalan Resistance: Language as Survival

Els Segadors, the Catalan national anthem, began as a seventeenth-century harvest song and became an anthem of resistance during the 1640 Catalan Revolt. It has been banned, suppressed, and sung in defiance ever since.

During the Franco dictatorship from 1939 to 1975, Catalan was prohibited in all public venues, including schools, government papers, and the media. Books written in Catalan were prohibited, and Catalan writers were occasionally prosecuted or imprisoned. The Franco regime also attempted to eliminate Catalan culture and customs, including the suppression of political Catalan identity manifestations.

Many Catalans were imprisoned, tortured, or murdered for their perceived resistance to the rule. Several academics and activists contend that Franco's administration committed genocide, as defined by the United Nations. One prominent victim was the former Catalan president, Lluís Companys, who was deported from Nazi-occupied France in 1940 and then executed in Barcelona. At his execution by firing squad, Compayns refused to wear a blindfold, and exclaimed 'Per Catalunya!' (‘For Catalonia!’) as the shots were fired. 

The Franco regime attempted to commit cultural and identity genocide against Catalonia, but only the combined action of resistance inside the country and in exile prevented it. The suppression of language and culture under Franco extended to the Basque Country and Galicia as well, though the cultural genocide framing has been applied most specifically to Catalonia in the scholarly literature. That Franco himself was Galician, from a region whose language his regime suppressed, is one of history's more pointed ironies.

The 1940s were a decade of brutal suppression and underground resistance. By the 1950s the regime began to soften its most overt cultural restrictions, not from tolerance but from political calculation, and by the 1960s a cautious cultural revival was underway, still operating within the constraints of a dictatorship that would not end until Franco's death in 1975.

Music was at the center of that revival. The Nova Cançó movement, which translates roughly as New Song, emerged in Catalonia in the late 1950s and grew through the 1960s as a direct act of cultural resistance. Singing in Catalan was itself a political statement. Artists like Maria del Mar Bonet, Lluís Llach, and Joan Manuel Serrat used folk and popular song forms to keep the language alive in public consciousness at a time when it remained banned from schools and government. Llach's 1968 song L'Estaca, about a stake holding everyone down that will fall if enough people pull together, became one of the most powerful protest anthems in Spanish history and was banned by the regime. It has since been adopted by resistance movements across Europe, including during the Solidarity movement in Poland of the 1980s.

It is worth noting that three of the most celebrated opera singers of the twentieth century were Catalan: Montserrat Caballé, Victoria de los Ángeles, and the tenor the world knows as José Carreras. Except his birth name was not José, it was Josep. Under Franco he was obliged to use the Spanish version. His father, originally a teacher, had resisted the Franco dictatorship and as a consequence was no longer permitted to teach. The family temporarily emigrated to Argentina when Carreras was a child. He now uses the Catalan form of his name for his leukemia foundation, a deliberate act of reclamation. In his own words: "In the 1950s, the situation in Spain was very difficult under General Franco's regime, especially for Catalans.”

Both Caballé and Victoria de los Ángeles used their international platforms to record and preserve Catalan musical culture. Victoria de los Ángeles recorded two albums of Catalan folk music, including Cançons Tradicionals Catalanes in 1991, an entire album of traditional songs recorded at Abbey Road Studios that includes Els Segadors. Caballé recorded a 1964 album of songs by Catalan composer Frederic Mompou, described as a moment of synergy between two giants of Catalan culture. 

The language survived in clandestinity. It survived in kitchens and bedrooms and church basements and exile publications and in the mouths of people who refused to stop speaking it. Today, Catalan is spoken in a territory that contains over 13 million inhabitants. More than 150 universities in the world teach Catalan and more than 400 journals are published in the language.

As recently as 2025, Spanish President Pedro Sánchez renewed a proposal to the Council of the European Union requesting that Catalan obtain official status at the EU level. The petition requires unanimous support and faced opposition from 7 out of 27 member states, preventing its adoption. Despite being spoken by more people than Danish, Irish, Finnish, Croatian, Estonian, and Bulgarian, Catalan is still fighting for recognition.

The Romani People: Celebrated at a Distance

Composer Manuel de Falla's Polo draws from the deep well of Andalusian Romani flamenco, a tradition that people travel from around the world to experience. Flamenco is one of the most globally celebrated musical forms in existence, yet the people who created it are among the most systematically marginalized in Europe.

According to the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights Roma Survey 2024, 54% of the Roma and Traveller population is in paid employment, compared to 75% of the general EU population. At the same time, 36% of the Roma and Traveller population felt discriminated against when looking for work, more than double the figure for 2016. 

46% of Romani children attend a school where all or most of the pupils are Romani or Traveller, indicating widespread educational segregation. Every third Roma or Traveller, 35%, experienced discrimination because of their ethnic background when looking for housing. 

The flamenco tradition has been nurtured by people living under exclusion and precarity. It is a music of survival, of love, and beauty insisted upon in the face of suppression. Unfortunately, the world's appetite for flamenco has not translated into protection or dignity for the Romani communities who created it. 

Menotti and the Bureaucracy of Cruelty

Gian Carlo Menotti was an Italian-born composer who immigrated to the United States in 1928. During World War II, his Italian citizenship caused him to be labeled an "enemy alien" by the American government. That experience of being caught between states, of belonging nowhere fully, of existing at the mercy of bureaucratic classification, runs directly through every note of The Consul. Menotti said he got the idea for the opera when he read a newspaper story about a woman in an Eastern Bloc country who was denied a visa to the United States and then committed suicide. One of the heartbreaking real stories behind the work was that of a Polish immigrant who hanged herself on Ellis Island after being denied entry to the United States. Menotti transformed those stories into a three-act opera about what it means to be at the mercy of a system that does not see you as human.

The Consul is set around an enigmatic consulate in Eastern Europe and constructs a world in which a family's desperate attempt to flee totalitarian rule is met with an indifferent bureaucracy. Menotti described the work not as an opera but as a "music drama," and insisted it have its premiere on Broadway rather than in an opera house so that it could reach the widest possible audience. It ran for 269 performances, won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Musical of 1950, and earned Menotti the Pulitzer Prize for Music. 

The Consul himself never appears on stage. He is a presence felt entirely through his absence, through the wall of secretaries and forms and waiting rooms that stand between Magda and the freedom she is trying to reach. If bureaucracy is the villain, paperwork is the weapon.

Magda's aria, To This We've Come, is the moment the opera stops being about a fictional Eastern European police state and becomes about every government that has ever decided that some people's lives are worth less than the processing of their documents. She has run out of patience for a system that runs on paper and produces nothing but grief. She does not petition or ask this time around but indicts.

In 2000, when Menotti himself directed a revival of The Consul at the Kennedy Center, the work fit directly into current debates about immigration, and that was twenty-six years ago. The opera has not aged a day since but has only become more accurate.

Mozart and Beaumarchais: The Revolution Already in Action

Napoleon Bonaparte called Beaumarchais's play The Marriage of Figaro "the Revolution already in action." The play was completed in 1781 and immediately banned.

King Louis XVI denounced the play, proclaiming: "It is hateful, it will never be played.... That man mocks everything that is to be respected in government." Beaumarchais lobbied energetically until he secured permission for a public performance on April 27, 1784. The play opened to a standing-room-only audience and ended with thunderous applause. It ran 68 consecutive performances, earning higher box-office receipts than any other French play of the eighteenth century. 

Emperor Joseph II also banned the play in Vienna, stating: "Since the piece contains much that is objectionable, I therefore expect that the Censor shall either reject it altogether, or at any rate have such alterations made in it that he shall be responsible for the performance of this play and for the impression it may make." 

In 1786, Mozart and Da Ponte ensured the play would go down in international history, turning it into one of the best-loved operas of all time. The opera was mostly faithful to the play's content and spirit, but it toned down many parts to escape censorship. 

The scene between the Count and Susanna is the opera's most compressed statement of its argument. A man in power who believes he is entitled to whatever he wants, including a woman who is about to be married. A woman with considerably less institutional power who outsmarts him completely. 

The French Revolution broke out five years after the play finally got its public premiere and Louis XVI was executed four years after that.

Unfortunately abuse of power and abuse of those who are vulnerable is, unfortunately, not something relegated to history books, as our current times show.

A Life of Consequence

Sheila Silver's Mariam's Aria comes from her opera A Thousand Splendid Suns, commissioned by Seattle Opera and premiered there in February 2023, with a libretto by Stephen Kitsakos based on Khaled Hosseini's novel. The opera tells the story of two Afghan women from different generations and walks of life, forced into marriage with the same man. Enemies at first, they grow to love each other like mother and daughter, and discover that the human spirit can survive and transcend the most challenging of circumstances. Mariam is the elder of the two women, an illegitimate child who has spent her life absorbing the world's contempt for her existence. The opera ends with Mariam walking to her execution, having killed her abusive husband to save the younger woman's life. As she walks, an understanding of her life brings her a sense of self-worth and spiritual peace: she has loved and been loved, saved a life, and lived a life of consequence.

As Hosseini himself said of the opera: "The arts remain our most powerful teachers of empathy, and it is my hope that this opera proves not only a beautiful musical journey but also an expression, through the tale of Mariam and Laila, of the collective struggles and sacrifices of Afghan women.”

Book Banning: The Ongoing Argument

Sheila Silver's Judy Blume's Bookstore from her new song cycle Songs of Resilience names something that continues to happen in this country, the self-proclaimed “Land of the Free”. 

The American Library Association documented 4,240 unique book titles targeted for censorship in 2023, a 65% surge over 2022 numbers, as well as 1,247 demands to censor library books, materials, and resources. The number of titles targeted for censorship at public libraries increased by 92% over the previous year. 

In 2025, the ALA tracked 4,235 unique titles challenged, the second highest ever documented. Of those titles, 1,671, representing 39%, concern the lived experiences of LGBTQIA+ people and people of color. In 2025, 92% of all book challenges were initiated by pressure groups, government officials, and decision makers, up from 72% in 2024. Less than 3% of challenges originated from individual parents. 

PEN America recorded 10,046 instances of public school book bans during the 2023 to 2024 school year, nearly tripling the previous year's numbers. 

The most common justifications for censorship: false claims of obscenity, LGBTQIA+ themes, and content about race, racism, equity, and social justice. In other words: books about people who exist.

The Government Banning Words

But it’s not only books that are being censored or outright banned by local, state, and federal governments.

PEN America compiled a list of more than 250 words and phrases reportedly no longer considered acceptable by the Trump administration, being scrubbed from government websites and documents. The list has expanded to 350 or more words, encompassing terms including "abortion," "women," "disability," "elderly," "Native American," "safe drinking water," and the Gulf of Mexico. Mention of these terms can result in research grants or other agreements with the federal government being cancelled.

The NSA distributed a memo to staff saying that all websites and internal network pages containing banned words would be deleted. The list of 27 banned words included: Anti-Racism, Racism, Allyship, Bias, DEI, Diversity, Diverse, Confirmation Bias, Equity, Feminism, Gender, Gender Identity, Inclusion, Inclusive, Intersectionality, Prejudice, Privilege, Racial Identity, Sexuality, Stereotypes, Pronouns, Transgender, Equality. 

The CDC ordered its scientists to retract and revise all articles containing "forbidden" words. Whole pages about HIV testing for transgender people, guidelines for HIV medication, and information on supporting LGBTQ+ youth health were removed from federal websites. 

When a government starts banning words, it is not bureaucratic tidying an attempt to make certain realities unspeakable. 

This is the same logic that banned The Marriage of Figaro in 1781. That banned Catalan in Franco's Spain. That forced Sappho's poetry into garbage dumps where it survived as papier-mâché coffin lining. The logic is always the same: if we can remove the words, we can remove the people.

Our Response

She Carries the Fire is not a sad concert. It is an angry one. And a joyful one.

Menotti's Magda, who has run out of patience for a system that runs on paper and produces nothing but grief. Mozart's Susanna, outmaneuvering power with wit and nerve. Undine Smith Moore, setting Sappho's 2,600-year-old love song for women. Sheila Silver, naming Judy Blume because Judy Blume got banned for writing about the things teenagers actually think and feel. Reena Esmail closing the evening with Take What You Need, which has been performed in jails and shelters and memorial services and which insists, stubbornly and beautifully, that community is what remains.

Every piece on this program is a voice that was told it did not belong and every performer on this stage is making the argument that it does.