Joshua Norton was a successful British-born rice merchant who turned up in San Francisco in the 1840s in time for the gold discovery at Sutter's Mill on the American River, some 100 miles distant from the city. He tried to corner the rice market, but went bankrupt with the arrival of foreign rice shippers in the San Francisco bay.

After six months he resurfaced as self-proclaimed "Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico." As badges of incumbency he wore an old beaver hat and a castoff fireman's uniform, and always carried a Chinese umbrella emblazoned with dragons. He printed his own money and issued proclamations, including a call for "a bridge that shall rise east to west across San Francisco Bay." San Franciscans were as kind to their street people then as they are today. They accepted him as an honorable eccentric, and admired his dedication to the Chinese laborers and the spirit of Mexico. When he died in 1880, 10,000 people turned out for his funeral.

Emperor Norton of the USA takes place in San Francisco from 1850 to 1880 at the end of the frontier. The railroads are inching west. Steckle, an urban political boss, and Darrin, head of the railroad, represent new California money and power. They struggle for control of commerce and government, while Norton and his Empress quietly but effectively promote rather nobler aspirations for the citizens.

Scene 1. A street in San Francisco. Emperor Norton has died. Ten thousand people have turned out to view his funeral procession. Norton's coffin leads the parade, followed by a chorus of street people. As the crowd deposits the coffin on a platform, Norton's ghost, in full regalia, climbs out. He passes his Chinese umbrella on to the woman who has declared herself to be his successor, the Empress Norton. Kearney, the corrupt union boss, sneers at Norton's memory: his Workingmen's Labor Party will soak the rich and run the Chinese out of town. The street people split into factions revealing the deep racial divisions of an immigrant country. Norton, as he did in real life, moves among the quarreling mob, reciting the Lord's Prayer and trying to pacify them.

Scene 2. John Steckle's office. Steckle derides the Emperor: "They've buried you Norton. The frontier is dead. ... This is a new time, my time." Norton's aria recounts his past as a wealthy rice merchant, his bankruptcy and disappearance, and his return. He stands by his coffin and watches events begin to unfold.

A Police Inspector escorts Empress Norton into Steckle's office. As proof of her rightful claim to Norton's throne, she produces the Chinese umbrella beneath which they were united in marriage. Steckle sends her to jail but after she is gone, reconsiders: a front woman might serve his purposes even better than Norton did. She could entertain the people while the politicians saw their plots through.

Scene 3. A French restaurant. The mayor of San Francisco (conductor and former head of the Musicians' Union) has been elected as a tool of Steckle's party. Madame Lulu, the restaurant hostess, greets Kroller, Steckle, and Henry Darrin, the railroad head, who arrive for a secret meeting. The street people are to be eliminated and the city cleaned up; the frontier days are over. Steckle broaches his plan to use the Empress as a diversion while they engineer a Waterfront Improvement Association that will make them all wealthy in real estate. A statue of Emperor Norton will attract the tourists, too.

Scene 4. Pantomime to orchestral music. Steckle and Kroller flirt with Madame Lulu. Darrin's disdain for his colleagues is evident. At the orchestral climax, he brushes them aside and disappears with Madame Lulu.

Scene 5. Flashback: The battle between Boss Kearney and Emperor Norton. Mounted on high-wheeled tricycles, they ride against each other: Kearney, with a bat; Norton, with his Chinese umbrella.

Scene 6. The jail. Irish Mary, Salvation Sal, and Annie of the Flowers mock the Empress Norton. But when she is released she takes the street women as her ladies-in-waiting. Proudly she sweeps out of jail followed by her three converts.

Scene 7. The office. Steckle has forged a copy of Norton's marriage proclamation. Handing it to the Empress, he promises the naive woman that the new Waterfront Improvement Association will honor Emperor Norton.

Scene 8. Flashback: Romance of the Emperor and Empress. After the death of her mother, a poor washerwomen, the Empress was adopted by a circuit-riding minister who drank and beat her until she ran away. "I lived on the street. I sold myself to live until I met Emperor Norton."

"Did we ever really meet?" Norton asks. "When you debated Kearney in the sandlot," she replies, as Kearney, Darrin, and Steckle materialize on the scene. Norton frets that they think him a madman, and that the people laugh at him and his proclamations. She reassures him: "The people laugh with you." Encouraged, he proclaims that "a great bridge shall rise across the bay, a bridge of peace and joy, a span of unity and freedom."

Scene 1. Darrin's study. He sings an exuberant aria in praise of El Caballero, "the biggest locomotive in the world." He will send Steckle to take charge of the operations in Southern California, where the Texas railroad threaten to move in--thus promoting him out of the way. The two rivals stare at each other, then shake hands and burst into laugher.

Scene 2. The Empress's room. Darrin has begun to clean up the city: the street people now require licenses, as San Francisco acquires its "stiff collar of respectability." The Empress begins to see that she is being used; she and Norton sing a wistful duet about the Chinese umbrella. Steckle enters with the news that the memorial bust of Norton will be unveiled at the dedication. Reluctantly, she agrees to speak at the ceremony--but then resolutely opens the Chinese umbrella again.

Scene 3. The banquet. Kearney and his men drunkenly toast the Emperor Norton. Mrs. Darrin, in formal dress, gushes to the Empress as to how greatly she had admired him. When she asks for a memento, the Empress offers the Chinese umbrella. "Chinese?" she replies with disdain: "I really meant photos, letters, diaries of the pioneers."

For her address, the empress opens the umbrella and goes on to recount how she has been used by the politicians while they turned the waterfront into an invisible jail. Pandemonium. Kroller, drunk, muses that "Politics is a rich man's game / Politics is the way to fame."

Scene 4. The Emperor and Empress. "Who will remember us?" she asks. "The Chinese umbrella will remember," he replies. "The people will remember." "Beyond death," they proclaim together, our dream lives on." Kearney and the others appear, though fading into the fog of history. Norton salutes his empress, climbs into the coffin, and bangs down the lid. She stands beside the coffin, holding the Chinese umbrella high. The street people regain their positions as in the opening tableau, frozen in time.

The opera began in 1961 as a play, The Empress Norton. In London Joan Littlewood and her Theatre Workshop took an interest in the new drama. She liked the feminist implications of an empress in a frontier society apparently ruled by men, and the variety of authentic street characters appealed to her notions of popular theater. She and Schevill talked as well of rewriting the work to offer more emphasis on Emperor Norton himself. But 1961 proved to be the last year of the Theatre Workshop, and the project ended in hiatus.

"In 1966," writes Schevill, "I saw a remarkable outdoor production, on a hilly street in San Francisco, of the Brecht-Weill Three-Penny Opera. The large audience and the old street performance made me think of a musical play about Emperor Norton and the characters of the 1860s and '70s who haunted the gas-lit streets." Eventually John Lion, founder of San Francisco Magic Theater, became interested in the Norton play. Emperor Norton Lives! was originally envisaged as a street play along the lines of the outdoor Three-Penny Opera. Jerome Rosen composed the songs.

The play-with-music opened in December 1979 at the Magic Theater in Fort Mason and ran from three weeks. What had emerged was a frontier struggle between Norton's visionary, half-mad desire for true community and the schemers' overriding greed for money and political power. And of course the romance between the emperor and the street woman who claimed to be his empress.

"Norton's vision of universal brotherhood," continues Schevill, "was genuine. His compassionate view of the individual and need for racial harmony seem all the more apt today." For the full opera Emperor Norton of the USA, Rosen recomposed the songs from the musical and expanded the overall dimension of the work, with the Emperor and Empress now fully developed with their own arias. A workshop reading of scenes with piano was given by the Providence New Music Ensemble at the Lederer Theater in March 1981.

Transforming the spoken play into a viable libretto involved eliminating some characters and putting others into sharper focus. The dialogue was greatly shortened, with the music now affording the atmosphere and some of the dramatic effect. The legend of the frontier continued to affect both composer and librettist: the work of understanding the conflict between our ideals and the violence within our society.

JAMES SCHEVILL, poet and playwright, returned in 1990 to his hometown, Berkeley, after twenty years in the east, While living in Providence, Rhode Island, he founded the Playwriting Workshop and taught creative writing at Brown University. He also served as playwright-in-residence for the Trinity Repertory Company, one of the most distinguished regional theaters in the United States.

During the 1960s, Schevill was the Director of the Poetry Center in San Francisco and taught at San Francisco State University. Awards for his poems and plays include Ford and Guggenheim Fellowships, a McNight fellowship in drama, and the 1991 Literary Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Schevill's most recent books are 5 Plays and a long historical sequence of poems, The Complete American Fantasies. His most recently play, The Last Romantics, was premiered in November 1997 by California on Stage, Berkeley.

JEROME ROSEN, noted composer, performing artist, and educator, is founding member of the Department of Music at UC-Davis, whose faculty he joined in the 1950s. His awards for composition include the George Ladd Prix de Paris, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two grants from the Fromm Foundation, and residence at the Rockefeller Study Center in Bellagio, Italy.

Rosen performed as saxophone soloist for his Saxophone Concerto with the UCD Symphony on 9 February 1997, and on 2­3 March 1997 his Sextet Sine Nomine was performed by the Empyrean Ensemble. He appeared 7 March 1998 as soloist with the Sacramento Wind Orchestra in his own Three Waltzes for Saxophone and Band.

Rosen's first opera, Calisto and Melibea, to a libretto by Edwin Honig, was premiered in the University Theatre Season at UC-Davis in June 1979.