“I had to let go of all of the lenses of fear that I had sort of put over my eyes as just being a Black man in this world, and really look at the world through Peter’s eyes.” “It has the same mission of centering Black humanity and the complex interiority of Blackness in America,” he said. But he also sees parallels to his previous work. “The Snowy Day” was a different kind of challenge, giving Thompson a chance to focus on a world of wonder and whimsy. That choral piece sets to music the final words of seven Black men killed during encounters with the police. He is best known for “The Seven Last Words of the Unarmed,” which premiered in 2015. Thompson has long had an interest in connecting music to social issues.

“That is the universal nature of ‘The Snowy Day.’” “It’s about a loving family who happens to be a family of color,” Pinkney said. (An early draft described him as a “brown sugar boy.”) They reworked the libretto several times, choosing to describe Peter as a “beautiful boy” rather than to explicitly mention his race. They added a father, who is featured in later books by Keats but not in “The Snowy Day,” to avoid any suggestion that Peter was being raised by a single mother. The creators wanted the work to show a Black family that was happy and intact to counter stereotypes in popular culture of dysfunction and despair in Black communities.

Houston grand opera the snowy day