On a personal level, Emmy-award winning composer Howard Fredrics knows about the Jewish struggle. He recently left his teaching job at Texas A&M University following an alleged series of anti-Semitic incidents, including an assault and an anonymous e-mail referring to him as a “greedy Jew — the kind of Jew that makes people hate Jews.”
On a professional level, Frederics, 40, is transforming that adversity into a new opera based on the life of Jewish boxer Jack “Kid” Berg.
“Regardless of how much punishment he took in the ring, he refused to give up,” Fredrics says of Berg. “That sort of persona is a very important metaphor to the struggle of Jews, and a theme for my opera.”
Combining his interest in electronic composition with his other pastime, collecting old pictures of boxers, Fredrics came up with “The Whitechapel Whirlwind,” based on the life story of the former world junior welterweight champion Berg, who happens to be a distant cousin of Fredrics’.
During a recent stay in the Bay Area, Fredrics, who now teaches music technology and theory at London’s Kingston University, participated in intensive computer music and multimedia programming courses at U.C. Berkeley. Some of the electronic composition techniques he developed there he will incorporate into his opera.
While in town, Fredrics also was able to consult and interview local author and sports historian Ken Blady, who has written extensively about Jewish boxers.
But before this opera idea was even born, it was the incidents at Texas A&M that helped catapult Frederic’s interest in electronic music.
After the alleged assault at his old university, Fredrics armed himself with a hidden tape recorder and confronted the colleague who he said assaulted him. He digitized his assailant’s defense — “I didn’t assault you, I just pushed you” — and ran it through a process called resonating, in which the rhythmic characteristics of the speech were tracked and generated into musical chords. He used the end result in a new electronic composition.
“The Whitechapel Whirlwind,” which, according to Fredrics, will be the first opera about boxing, is also an electronic composition.
Born Judah Bergman, Berg was one of a sizable group of successful Jewish boxers in the 1920s and ’30s. He was born to Ukranian parents in the East End slums of London, and found that boxing was a ticket out of poverty.
Berg started fighting when he was 13, overcame discrimination and beat formerly undefeated fighters, and he eventually worked his way up to the world welterweight champion title in 1930 and 1931, which earned him the nickname “The Whitechapel Whirlwind.”
Fredrics first became interested in Berg’s life when he moved to London last year and tried to get in touch with his English relatives. He picked up a semi-autobiographical book on Berg, hoping to find some family information, and became fascinated with the details of Berg’s life and personality.
Berg brought his religious and ethnic identity into the boxing ring. Like many other Jewish boxers of that era, he wore a blue Star of David on his boxing shorts. Berg was known for taking his ethnic pride a step further, though: He often wore a tallit and even wrapped his tefillin and prayed before a match.
“His behavior in the boxing ring was probably part showmanship, part defiance,” says Fredrics.
Throughout his life, Berg was determined to remain in the spotlight. Even through his 50s and 60s, he was convinced that he would someday make a comeback.
Once, Fredrics says, when Berg was in his 60s, he visited Harlem, where many of his boxing matches had taken place years before. A group of kids attempted to mug him. Berg immediately put up his fists. The kids eventually backed down — probably more out of respect for the old man than out of fear.
“He was never willing to give up,” says Fredrics. “He even lived his last years as though in a time warp — refusing to believe that his celebrity years were gone.”
Fredrics has researched Berg’s life extensively, meeting with boxing historians, family members and Jewish historical societies. He has collected hours of videotaped interviews with Berg, photographs and other source material to be used for his multimedia opera. The opera will include video clips, audio and projections, as well as electronic music and a conventional orchestra.
Its opening overture will include sounds associated with a boxing match — ringing and shouting (all triggered by a keyboard) — before slowly moving into more traditional instruments and then a choir. It will follow Berg’s life from the moment his parents arrived in England to the boxer’s death in 1991.
A highlight of the opera will be the interaction between the characters of Berg, Tony Canzoneri (an Italian American fighter) and Jack Johnson (an African American fighter).
“My opera is not just about the struggle of Jews,” says Fredrics. “It is also about the struggle of all immigrants and minorities.”
Fredrics plans to have his opera in production within four to five years. He hopes to premiere with the English National Opera and to tour throughout England and the United States.