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€œI think opera as a genre lends itself to great emotions. the colorful way that Jack Keats portrays snow so it’s not just the realistic white that we see here in New England, but we see purple and blue and all those other colors in the snow. ”ĭescribing the book’s enduring appeal, Thompson says, “I think he taps into that intangible sense of wonder that we tend to lose as we get older and it’s all over the book. “I was able to tap into that sense of wonder that Peter experiences, I think, when he sees snow for the first time. Although he didn’t experience his first real snowfall until November 2018. As a child he owned a copy of Snow day in English and Spanish. The composer, who is currently pursuing his doctorate in musical arts at Yale University, grew up in the Bahamas – although he spent three years in Houston from the age of 10 – and now considers Atlanta his port. €œBecause of its simplicity, people are able to superimpose their own imaginations and their own goals on the book,” says Thompson. The two had somewhat different views on the message he was conveying, he said, but that didn’t stop them from working in a “very free and collaborative process.”

Thompson and librettist Andrea Davis Pinkney worked to build the score and story out of what is, admittedly, a fairly short book about a young boy’s experiences with snow. It was the first picture book with an African-American main character to win a children’s grand prize. What made the book groundbreaking when it was published in 1962 was that the main character Peter was a young black boy. HGO’s proposal represented a chance to do something different.įrom the award-winning Caldecott book of the same title by Ezra Jack Keats, the opera version of Snow day will premiere at HGO on December 9. His compositions such as “The Seven Last Words of the Unarmed” often deal with heavier themes.

€œAll of a sudden, opera made sense as a possible genre for me,” says Thompson, who until now was best known for his orchestral and choral work. Emmy-winning composer Joel Thompson had never done opera before, but when Patrick Summers of the Houston Grand Opera approached him with the seed of an idea to build on the classic children’s book Snow dayhe was both “humiliated” and ready to go.