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A case of inspiration
By JOHN FLEMING
© St. Petersburg Times, published March 15, 2001
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Opera and politics
Maestro Anton Coppola brings his lifelong fascination with Sacco and Vanzetti to the stage, but don't expect him to solve the case.
Young fan sings opera's praises
If you're under 40 and you've never seen an opera, "recruiter" JL Wagner wants you.
About the production
Anton Coppola's Sacco & Vanzetti is a two-act opera with 13 scenes and a prologue. |
Anton Coppola's opera Sacco & Vanzetti joins a crowded field. There have been quite a few other artistic treatments of the case known as the "trial of the century."
In Winterset, a play by Maxwell Anderson that was a Broadway hit in 1935 and made into a movie the next year, Burgess Meredith (on stage and screen) played a young man modeled on Sacco's son, determined to find out who had been responsible for a crime pinned on his father. A recent play about the case is Louis Lippa's Sacco & Vanzetti, a vaudeville version that was given a staged reading in January at the Gorilla Theatre in Tampa. Upton Sinclair wrote a 1928 novel on the case called Boston. In the 1940s, Woody Guthrie wrote a series of ballads on Sacco and Vanzetti, but he wasn't pleased with the results, and they weren't released until 1964 (with an additional song by Pete Seeger) on a Folkways album. Joan Baez wrote The Ballad of Sacco and Vanzetti for a 1971 Italian movie, Sacco e Vanzetti, with a score by Ennio Morricone.
Probably the definitive history of the case is Herbert R. Ehrmann's 1969 book, The Case That Will Not Die: Commonwealth vs. Sacco and Vanzetti.
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