Robert Zimmerman: Compositions

The Flight Attendant

play it

mezzo soprano soloist with fl+picc, ob, cl, cl+bcl, tpt, 3 tb,
2 vn, vl, vc, cb, pf, 2 perc

September 13 is my working title for an opera that has grown out of my personal reaction to the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington in 2001. The setting is on an airplane, flying a domestic route on Sept. 13, 2001, the day that air traffic resumed after the attacks. The four characters present a range of personal, professional, and cultural backgrounds that lead to distinctly different ways of thinking about and reacting to the attacks. They are identified in this generic sense, rather than by name. There is, first of all, the Flight Attendant, who has the most personal and painful connection to the tragedy, since one of the flight attendents who was killed in the attack had been a colleague and friend, though they hadn't been in touch for several years. A second character, the Firefighter, is also struggling with his personal identification with the people like him who died. The Arab is an Egyptian-American professional whose younger brother has become a militant islamist. He is struggling with the burden of having a sympathic understanding of both sides of the conflict, and also with fact that in the midst of so much angry passion, he looks like "the enemy." Finally, there is the Tourist, a woman whose connection to the attacks is simply that she is an American and a human being, and she loves to visit New York City.

I hadn't thought about you in so long.
Not really.
Just, now and then, a little reminder, to make me smile,
    knowing you would smile, too was enough.
Even on that day, stuck in Denver.
I didn't.
Too numb, I guess.
Feeling sorry for myself, maybe, I don't know, but
I didn't wonder about you.
Even waiting in line to join the grim faces reading the list
Scared I won't feel anything appropriate.
If only I had braced myself then
Maybe I could have handled it better,
Without making such a scene, maybe.
Without leaving knots still tied in the pit of my stomach.

I try to think about all those shattered women.
Singled out by a news flash, like the glare of thousand spotlights.
So that now all that's left of their loved one
    is a nightmare they can't stop seeing...
In gleaming steel towers, under a postcard-perfect sky
On a plane that appears again and again in the picture.
Lining itself up, every time, to do the impossible.

But I'm not one of those women.
I've got to stop acting like it.
After all, I hadn't thought about you in such a long, long time
But up here, how can I stop it?
When every time I turn a corner
I'm sure I see
Your glossy black hair pinned back just so.

      - Robert Zimmerman