A World-Premiere Oratorio for a Anti-Slavery Abolitionist

A few years ago, the pianist and composer Allison Lovejoy was looking into her family history when a name of a distant relative caught her attention.

Elijah Parish Lovejoy, born in 1802 to a deeply spiritual family, was a newspaper editor and devout abolitionist. Decades before the Civil War, Lovejoy received what he referred to as a calling from God to fight for an end to slavery.

In Missouri, Lovejoy was warned to stop printing and distributing his anti-slavery materials, and his printing presses were destroyed multiple times. Lovejoy kept replacing them, and continued his work until a pro-slavery mob murdered him in 1837.

Allison Lovejoy shared her findings with longtime friend and former San Francisco Poet Laureate Jack Hirschman. Hirschman recognized the Lovejoy name, and asked if she knew about Elijah’s legacy.

“I said Jack, yes, I was just reading about him the other night,” Lovejoy tells me today. “I was thinking of writing an opera.”

This week, Lovejoy is in rehearsals with the with the Golden Gate Symphony Orchestra and Chorus to premiere her oratorio dedicated to Lovejoy, Elijah’s Call, on Sunday, Nov. 3 at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. It’s the culmination of years of work, sparked by a single family discovery, and a desire to honor a fearless ancestor.

An Internal Conflict

Elijah Lovejoy’s mother taught her children to read the Bible. But in early adulthood, Elijah felt lost, waiting for God to show him his life’s calling. Restless, he set out on an incredible journey on foot, walking from his hometown in Maine to what was then the edge of the country: St. Louis, Missouri.

It was this internal conflict, Lovejoy says, that would become the starting point for Lovejoy’s work.

Needing a librettist, Lovejoy brought in San Francisco writer and historian Gary Kamiya. Together, the two dove head-first into Elijah Lovejoy’s life and career. Kamiya helped select the most significant events of Lovejoy’s life to include; he also wrote lyrics, using Elijah Lovejoy’s words as a guide.

“We interpolated quite a few of Elijah Lovejoy’s own writings, as well as statements made by his enemies — political defenders of slavery,” Kamiya tells me. He studied books for added context, as well as family histories written by other relatives.

“[There was] a book written by his brothers, Joseph and Owen Lovejoy, called Memoir of the Reverend Elijah P. Lovejoy that has a lot of lengthy quotations, including poems that he wrote,” Kamiya says.

Allison Lovejoy, meanwhile, researched the language of the time to better understand Elijah Lovejoy’s rhetoric, and its influences from the era’s church preachers. She also read up on music of the 1820s. “I didn’t want to write in that style,” she says, “but I wanted to understand that sound.”

Ultimately, Lovejoy felt that an oratorio, not an opera or a cantata, would best tell Elijah Lovejoy’s story. She was worried, though.

“Oratorios sound scary because it sounds very biblical, very intimidating, like Handel’s Messiah,” she says. “And I said, well then, I can’t call it ‘Elijah.’”

She kept thinking about Lovejoy on his long trek to St. Louis, waiting for his life’s calling, and about the moment he’d found that calling in abolition work. The oratorio’s title came to her: Elijah’s Call.

A Life Cut Short By a Violent Mob

“The whole thing about ‘the call’ is someone walking, step, step,” Lovejoy says. “A tired person, walking with this constant motor with this ostinato rhythm underneath, so you have a feeling of movement, but then you also have the voices of the chorus like a Greek choir, calling his conscience. ‘What are you going to do? Where are you going?’ And they give him the courage to move forward.”

Courage was certainly a necessity for an abolitionist in the slave state of Missouri. As the editor of the St. Louis Observer in the early to mid-1830s, Elijah Lovejoy published editorials that began as anti-slavery pieces, but over time grew more radical, eventually calling for universal emancipation.

As his writings spread, Lovejoy’s enemies grew larger in rank, destroying his presses. Eventually Lovejoy left Missouri for the free state of Illinois and his family’s safety.

Settling across the Mississippi River in the town of Alton, Lovejoy ordered a new printing press to begin his work again. When it arrived in 1837, a violent mob formed and stormed the warehouse where the printing press was stored. While trying to stop the mob, Lovejoy was shot and killed.

Reviewing the tragic events of Lovejoy’s life and death, Allison Lovejoy thought long and hard on how to best evoke emotion through the oratorio. Lovejoy’s choices of tempo and key are one piece of it.

“But in addition to that, it’s dynamic layering and buildup,” she says. To that end, Lovejoy opted to tap a variety of influences for Elijah’s Call, including Black gospel music.

The Civil Rights Attorney Joins

Lovejoy’s initial dive into her family history began around 2020, when George Floyd was murdered. Lovejoy saw parallels between Elijah Lovejoy and Floyd — how their murders are part of a larger, intersectional fight for justice and safekeeping of Black lives and those who advocate for them.

In choosing the narrator of Elijah’s Call, then, Lovejoy found a perfect fit in Oakland-based civil rights activist and lawyer Walter Riley. The father of musician and filmmaker Boots Riley and a longtime friend of Lovejoy, Riley was immediately drawn to Elijah Lovejoy’s story.

“The idea of fighting slavery … and the history of those folks who were building a movement resonates with me,” he says. “It’s the kind of work I do now: civil rights activism, social justice issues.”

When I ask Lovejoy what it’s like working with Riley, she smiles warmly. “It’s wonderful,” she says. “I’ve always admired his insights. His wisdom brings something to the piece that elevates it.”

Connecting the Past to the Present

Elijah Lovejoy may not be widely known today, but Lovejoy hopes the oratorio will help change that. For both Lovejoy and Riley, Elijah Lovejoy’s story is directly connected to modern social movements, present-day civil rights efforts, and the language thereof. The phrase “I lit a lamp,” for example, which appears more than once in the oratorio, holds multiple meanings.

“I didn’t know that that [phrase] was a symbolic line — the lighting of the lamp of the Underground Railroad,” Lovejoy says. “I use that throughout the oratorio to say, light your lamp, keep it shining.”

For Riley, the connection between Elijah Lovejoy and today’s fight for racial justice was instantaneous.

“It’s the exact kind of story we see today,” he tells me. “It’s part of the struggle we face. And every time we see an example from history from… the folks who came before us, it’s useful to pay attention to that, and celebrate that, and then maybe we become a more…enlightened society.” He points a finger as he speaks. “That’s what Elijah learned in this story. He learned about and accepted the humanity of these Black folks…but they attacked him and killed him for it.”

Before Lovejoy has to head back into dress rehearsal for the oratorio, I ask what she hopes audiences will take away from Elijah’s Call.

“Mainly,” she says, “Inspiration to do the right thing, and inspiration to stand together.”

‘Elijah’s Call’ premieres Sunday, Nov. 3, at the Palace of Fine Arts Theatre in San Francisco. Details here.