Composer reimagines his Harvey Milk opera while rebuilding life after traumatic injury

Transcript

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Geoff Bennett: Harvey Milk’s name returned to the headlines this past summer after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the name of the slain gay rights advocate who served in the U.S. Navy removed from a neighborhood.

But Milk’s legacy lives on in other ways, including an opera about his life that carries a powerful story of its own.

Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown reports from San Francisco for our ongoing coverage of the intersection of health and arts, part of our Canvas series.

Jeffrey Brown: It’s the story of gay rights activist and politician Harvey Milk, his sexual and political awakening, his impactful life as the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California in 1977, serving on San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors, and his violent death along with Mayor George Moscone, assassinated by former Supervisor Dan White.

The opera “Harvey Milk” was first performed in 1995. Many years later, composer Stewart Wallace took it on again.

Stewart Wallace, Composer: I rewrote the whole thing from the first page, from the blank page, so while it is the same opera in a way, there’s nothing the same.

Jeffrey Brown: “Harvey Milk Reimagined” also with the libretto by Michael Korie was presented earlier this summer by the San Francisco group Opera Parallele. In the new version of the opera, the story and number of characters are slimmed down, the pacing faster, changes Wallace says he’d long wanted to make.

Stewart Wallace: We all look for that in our lives to get a chance to redo things. And I was — when we premiered “Harvey Milk,” I was 34 years old. I will be 65 this year, so hopefully I have learned a few things in the interim.

Jeffrey Brown: He also experienced something in the interim that makes this an unusual kind of redo.

In 2010, Wallace was in a bicycle accident that led to a traumatic brain injury, or TBI. It left his life in shambles and took away his ability to write music.

So this led to years and years of what?

Stewart Wallace: Struggle, depression, lack of ability to really do much of anything.

Jeffrey Brown: Yes.

Stewart Wallace: I mean, there was a period where I was practically comatose and just kind of staring off into space, unable to do anything. So it was pretty shocking.

Jeffrey Brown: The loss of your ability to write music was…

Stewart Wallace: Catastrophic. And to have that sort of stripped away in a way that I couldn’t really even understand was devastating.

Jeffrey Brown: Also devastating, a sense that his doctors had nothing to offer.

Stewart Wallace: The experts failed me. And so…

Jeffrey Brown: Is that how it felt?

Stewart Wallace: Oh, sure, sure.

Jeffrey Brown: Yes.

Stewart Wallace: And I come from a medical family, and in which medicine was revered. And so it was a great disappointment, I have to say.

But I think this is true. brain science is in its infancy. And people just don’t know.

Dr. Geoffrey Manley, University of California, San Francisco: That’s a totally common-sounding story.

Jeffrey Brown: As it turns out, even a leading neurosurgeon, Dr. Geoffrey Manley of the University of California, San Francisco, shares that view.

Dr. Geoffrey Manley: It’s completely understandable and, I feel embarrassed and ashamed as part of the medical community that we really haven’t done a better job here. But I think if you go to any large metropolitan area and you say where’s the cancer clinic, they will say, OH, it’s over there, or where’s the heart clinic, they will say, it’s over there.

And you say well, where’s the TBI clinic? And everybody’s like, I don’t know, because it doesn’t yet exist.

Jeffrey Brown: Dr. Manley didn’t treat Stewart Wallace, but his experience, he says rings, true. Five million Americans live with some kind of long-term disability from a head injury, but distinguishing and diagnosing different kinds of injuries and applying treatments for them remains little understood.

Too often, Manley says a traumatic brain injury is seen as a one-off event, rather than a process requiring care over time, even years.

Dr. Geoffrey Manley: If you think about a concussion in a sports — a sporting event, it was like, oh, well the person got their bell rung. And it was like, oh, well that just happened, right? And I think we didn’t stop to think about, well, so what did the person look like on day two or day five or a week later?

It was just an event. This wasn’t something that led to a process which for some results in disability.

Jeffrey Brown: Now Manley and nearly 100 experts the world over have proposed a classification system to evaluate specific head injuries and, they hope, develop targeted treatments.

Dr. Geoffrey Manley: So, better diagnosis, better prognosis, better treatment, and ultimately better outcome.

Jeffrey Brown: Stewart Wallace’s comeback took years. He credits acupuncture for a first boost and later he says microdosing psilocybin also helped. But he readily admits he doesn’t know exactly how those affected him.

What he is sure of, the act of writing music again, in fact, rewriting this piece from his past, made an enormous difference to his recovery.

Stewart Wallace: I was just then taking baby steps back to working, to really making music, and I thought, well, if I can’t, nothing lost. But I did it because I felt music holds memory and maybe, really maybe — it was a kind of experiment on myself — maybe I could find my way back by diving back into “Harvey Milk” and finding those memories that would propel me back to my work.

And I have to say it worked like an explosion.

Jeffrey Brown: I asked Dr. Manley what he takes from this part of Wallace’s story, finding his way back through music and memory.

Dr. Geoffrey Manley: I think this is a phenomenal story because it shows you the ability of the brain to recover from more significant brain injuries.

I think that those of us who are in the field are quite open to look at any means possible to restore function and to allow somebody to be able to return to what they did before, because that’s what makes life meaningful.

Jeffrey Brown: And so “Harvey Milk Reimagined,” a deeply personal saga for its composer, but also again part of a national conversation involving its subject.

The very week it was performed in San Francisco, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ordered the Navy to rename a ship that bore the name of Harvey Milk, himself a Navy veteran. Baritone Michael Kelly, who played Milk and, as a gay man, sees him as a hero, says the administration’s moves show how relevant Milk and his legacy remain.

Michael Kelly, Actor: It feels like a message that they are therefore shadowing what they intend to do, which is to continue to suppress our voices and to erase our existence.

Jeffrey Brown: And the opera in that context does what?

Michael Kelly: It revives the voice of Harvey Milk and his efforts to ensure that all people, no matter what their sexual orientation or position in society is, that the Constitution works for all of us.

Jeffrey Brown: For the “PBS News Hour,” I’m Jeffrey Brown in San Francisco.