Schafer's 1981 Wilderness Opera Was a Pioneer — and a Problem

R. Murray Schafer's 1981 plein air opera 'The Princess of the Stars' is one of the earliest progenitors of indigenous opera — and one of the most overlooked works in the post-WWII operatic record. That double status is the subject of the second installment of OperaWire's four-part series on underperformed operas from outside America and Central Europe, which examines the Canadian experimental work and the controversy that shadows it.

The series' first part covered Miguel Bernal Jiménez's 'Tata Vasco' (1941), a Mexican favorite that whitewashed the theocratic colonization of Michoacán's indigenous peoples by Spain in the 16th century. Part two asks the inverse question: what happens when the colonized peoples are placed at the center of the story?

What does the opera change?

Schafer's opera normalized a trajectory now carried by works including Anthony Davis's 'Wakonda's Dream,' the White Snake Projects, Harry Somers's 'Louis Riel,' 'Sun Dance Opera,' and, most recently, 'Li Keur' and 'Empire of Wild.' As the essay argues, indigenous stories on the operatic stage are not a new development. What is new is how narratives are crafted, communities are involved, and performances are handled.

The work draws on the Ojibway/Anishinaabe story of the Sun Disk, his daughter, and the Three Horned Enemy. The Three Horned Enemy takes the Princess hostage and holds her at the bottom of a lake. Wolf, helped by birds, pursues the enemy; a fight erupts, stopped by the Sun Disk, who orders the birds to stop singing and the lake to freeze until Wolf saves his daughter. The opera wakes with the rising sun, merging indigenous stories and the natural world in aleatoric and non-aleatoric ways.

Musicologist Tyler Kinnear notes that much of the narrative corresponds to natural phenomena mythologized in indigenous stories. Water is centralized in ways that echo Ojibway/Anishinaabe origin stories, and relationships between human, animal, and non-human beings run as a constant theme. The opera can be heard as a creation story, an underworld tale like Persephone's, or a personification of the continual battle between Sun and Night.

Where is the controversy?

'The Princess of the Stars' is the preface to Schafer's 'Patria,' an 11-part series of operas on indigenous themes. Lukas Sawatsky has documented that Schafer's approach was not always scrupulous or respectful: the series upheld the notion of terra nullius — the untouched land in which native peoples become everyone's ancestors rather than a sovereign people with real concerns.

Dylan Robinson's 2020 book 'Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies' records Schafer's own words: "When you finally realize you come from Canada (with no strings attached) you find yourself brother and sister of the Indians and the Inuit." Schafer also disparaged Inuit throat singing, remarking there was a "marked similarity between an Eskimo singing and Sir Winston Churchill clearing his throat."

The essay's sharpest charge concerns 'Patria's' syncretic blending of mythologies, stories, temporalities, kingdoms and peoples — in effect, it argues, cannibalizing Ojibway/Anishinaabe stories. Schafer's self-image as a "brother" of these communities, the author writes, licensed him to do as he pleased with them.

Kinnear argues the opera attempted "to create an all-sensorial wilderness experience that can be utilized as a method to invite a return to an idealized past where humans become part of a larger, truly grand Canadian landscape." The essay closes on a firmer note: 'The Princess of the Stars' is an indigenous story and belongs to indigenous peoples — everyone else is a guest, and should remember it.