From the Sun vaults, November 2-8, 1979

Marin couldn't eat a whole one 30 years ago this week.

One of the many challenges facing regional opera productions is to convince the average suburban that the grandest of Western music traditions can be accessible and engaging to the masses.

And one Marin composer believed he had the vital ingredient that would bring both Joe Six-Pack and Joe Haydn to the table: cannibalism.

"Today there may be as few as a dozen new works introduced worldwide during each opera season," wrote Pacific Sun opera critic Stephanie von Buchau in November of 1979. "The composers of these new works live in a kind of limbo of terror and ecstasy, as their 'baby' is going to be thrust upon a hostile world."

And local composer Ron McFarland's latest "baby" took its story from folks who literally were thrust upon a hostile world--the Donner Party.

The grisly tale of the 1840s pioneering families--whose ill-advised odyssey left them snowbound and starving in the Sierra mountains--was well known thanks to the 1936 George Stewart novel, Ordeal by Hunger. But would the story's infamous anthropophagic plot twist render it a risky commission for opera lovers expecting a fat lady at curtain's fall?

McFarland, who'd studied music under Arnold Schoenberg and Ethel Leginska, based The Donner Party on a prize-winning epic of the same name by poet George Keithley, whose recent reading of the work at College of Marin had "dissolved the audience in tears," wrote von Buchau. But, despite its initial interest, COM passed on The Donner Party; the composer fared little better in whetting the appetites of Dominican or Indian Valley colleges. Oddly enough, the relatively conservative-leaning students at Chico State were known for their openness to modern opera and after digesting the idea of a Donner Party opus, the university agreed to stage the world premiere.

"A small miracle took place in Chico last weekend," wrote von Buchau following The Donner Party debut. "New music by a living composer was brought to life.

"What a black eye for Marin County," she chided, "that the work of a local composer had to be presented 170 miles away." (That's 70 miles farther than the distance from Donner Pass to Fort Sutter.) Coincidentally, another cannibalism-themed stage musical opened on Broadway that year--Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd. It ran for 557 performances and won several Tony Awards.

These days McFarland is still composing and wiles away many an afternoon teaching a new generation of ivory ticklers from his base of operations in Tiburon (www.marinpianolessons.com).

The 81-year-old McFarland fondly recalls the Sun's story about The Donner Party, but laughs that von Buchau, a longtime friend, overplayed the supposed controversy about his opera. "In order to be on the cover of a newspaper like the Pacific Sun [the story had to be somewhat controversial," he says. "And the only way she could make it sound controversial was to ask--why the hell aren't they doing it in Marin?"

The opera was eventually performed by the Berkeley Symphony under Kent Nagano and has recently enjoyed performances at the College of Marin and the Tiburon Music Festival. In fact, he says, the opera doesn't even "spend too much time on all of that [cannibalism. There are scenes where they talk about cutting people up and eating them--but we make note that they're starving and desperate."

Still, admits McFarland, "it's a curious story to make into an opera, I must say."

In fact, recalls the composer, there was a real-life villain in the Donner Party named Lewis Keseberg who stayed on when everyone else left with rescuers because, as he later told biographer Charles McGlashan, he liked the taste of human flesh. "He kept a big pot where he went around digging for human bodies and brought them home and cooked them," McFarland says. "Apparently after her husband died, Tamsen [Donner went to him for help and she never left his cabin."

"But that wasn't in the opera," notes McFarland. "I think that's going a bit too far."

To learn more about Ron, visit www.mcfarlandmusic.com.

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