MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Now we turn to the intersection of history and music. Philip Glass is one of this country's best-known composers. Christopher Hampton won an Oscar for his adapted screenplay of "Dangerous Liaisons." Nearly ten years ago, the two collaborated on an opera called "Appomattox" about the end of the Civil War and what followed. But since then, the two decided that the story wasn't over. This weekend, a revised and updated version of the opera premiered in Washington, D.C., and Nathalie Boyd has the story.
NATHALIE BOYD, BYLINE: When the Washington National Opera told Philip Glass it wanted to stage "Appomattox," Glass told the company he needed to rewrite the opera to reflect what's happened in the U.S. since it premiered in 2007.
PHILIP GLASS: In the last seven or eight years, there've been profoundly and really horrific changes in the way this country understands itself.
BOYD: Glass says his original inspiration came from growing up in a segregated Baltimore and taking class trips to Gettysburg to learn about the Civil War.
GLASS: In my mind, the great American story is the Civil War. It's something that was all around when we grew up. It didn't really matter which community you were from. It was something that we knew about.
(SOUNDBITE OF OPERA, "APPOMATTOX")
UNIDENTIFIED SINGER #1: (Singing) Why must we end the war with senseless slaughter? How will we ever reunite our people?
BOYD: The original version of Glass' opera focused on the end of the war and attempts to address the underlying issue of slavery. But the revised version splits the opera's two acts into the struggle for peace and the fight to pass the Voting Rights Act a century later.
GLASS: Basically, what we did is we took the two acts that were composed and made into Act One, which was 1865, and made Act Two 1965. And that was not a separation that we had imagined in the first production. And then by doing it that way, we began again immediately to see the symmetries and the differences.
(SOUNDBITE OF OPERA, "APPOMATTOX")
BOYD: While the Voting Rights Act was passed 50 years ago, librettist Christopher Hampton says recent efforts to undermine it led him to revisit the story, first in a play and now the revised opera.
CHRISTOPHER HAMPTON: Some of the pieces that you work on, some of the place that you write won't you alone because the subject just nags at the back of your head. But there are other things that keep developing as the situation keeps developing in the world.
BOYD: As Hampton was rewriting the opera, a former Alabama state trooper who killed a voting rights activist in 1964 pled guilty to manslaughter charges.
HAMPTON: The state trooper who had shot dead Jimmie Lee Jackson had just been arrested, although it was 2010, 45 years after it had happened, and been sentenced to six months in jail.
BOYD: The killing of Jimmie Lee Jackson sparked the pivotal marches from Selma to Montgomery, so Hampton and Glass made the ballad central to the second act.
(SOUNDBITE OF OPERA, "APPOMATTOX")
UNIDENTIFIED SINGER #2: (Singing) Last month, a young man named Jimmie Lee Jackson, the deacon of the church in Marion, was callously and viciously cut down.
BOYD: Fifty years later, attitudes towards toward police brutality are changing, says Soloman Howard, the bass who sings the roles of Frederick Douglass and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in "Appomattox."
SOLOMAN HOWARD: In the actual opera, we talk about the fact that police officers were killing and getting away with - self-defense is always what's been used. Today, there's question.
BOYD: Composer Philip Glass wanted to give voice to those questions in the opera.
GLASS: The world was changing while we were working on the piece. The piece is really art imitating life in the biggest way it possibly can.
(SOUNDBITE OF OPERA, "APPOMATTOX")
UNIDENTIFIED SINGER #3: (Singing) But a light has come at last, for the truth will not forever be denied.
BOYD: For his part, singer Soloman Howard says he wants audiences who see the revised "Appomattox" to think about their role in American history.
HOWARD: Life encompasses everyone - and to think about humanity, think about equality, to think about, you know, us coming more together and achieving goals that should've been achieved long ago. Our work is not done.
BOYD: For NPR News, I'm Nathalie Boyd in Washington.
(SOUNDBITE OF OPERA, "APPOMATTOX")
UNIDENTIFIED SINGER #4: His truth is marching on.
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