By Angie Fitton

Not everyone gets to live a life dedicated to the thing they’re most passionate about. That is not true for Dr. Jon Ceander Mitchell. He’s a Chicago native, but has lived in Franklin for over twenty years.

Dr. Mitchell holds the title “Professor Emeritus of Music” at University of Massachusetts Boston, where he served as Conductor of the Chamber Orchestra and Coordinator of Music Education for nearly a quarter of a century. He has over one hundred publications to his credit. This includes ten CDs, with professional orchestras, and eight books. He was the 2019 recipient of the College Orchestra Directors Association (CODA) Lifetime Achievement Award and currently serves on the boards of the International Conductors Guild and IGEB.

In 2019, Dr. Mitchell and his adult son visited England, where they saw iconic treasures such as Stonehenge. They also visited the shoreline village of Lyme Regis, where Mitchell became inspired to write his very first opera about “Mary Anning: Fossil Hunter.” The characters in the opera are based on real-life people that Mitchell researched while in England. “I spent hours reading about Mary Anning,” Mitchell explains.

Born in 1799, Mary is actually quite the miracle; as a baby, she was in the arms of a woman who was standing under a tree, and that tree got struck by lightning, and because the woman was standing on a root, she was electrocuted, as was Mary. Mary’s father rushed his daughter home where he and his wife put her into a warm bath and somehow resuscitated her.

As a teenager, she and the love of her life, Henry de la Beche, would scour the shores searching for seashells and fossils, though their being together caused conflict, because, unlike Mary, Henry was part of the upper class, and his family believed Mary wasn’t good enough for him. This is only one of the conflicts taking place in the opera.

The other conflict is that, as a woman, Mary and her works were often discredited or stolen by men as their own. Mary was a self-taught geologist who carved out a life for herself, but it was believed that she had no right to be involved with sciences because they were dominated by British gentlemen, and in the 1800’s, women were nowhere near equal to men. It is also believed that Mary was the source of the tongue twister “She sells seashells by the seashore,” which will be sung in the opera.

“Mary Anning: Fossil Hunter” took Dr. Mitchell two years to write, and then another two years to refine. He began with the idea of doing something small to honor Mary and the finished product is an opera that lasts over an hour. Once he finished the opera, he started on his path to bringing it to the stage.

Dr. Mitchell’s first call was to Jessica Cooper, head of the Henry Purcell Society of Boston, because she has been curating and directing programs for over a decade at the University of Massachusetts. Upon reaching out, Cooper gave Mitchell many names of people he could contact in regard to putting on his opera. He decided to partner with the Greater Milford Community Chorus, as well as five very talented opera singers, conductor Richard Owen, and eight instrumentalists to present the show.

“I’m not conducting the opera myself, because I am too close to the material,” Dr. Mitchell states while emphatically discussing his piece and the people who will take part in it.

He then looked into numerous venues for live arts, ultimately deciding upon The First Universalist Society of Franklin, who are highly enthused about the performance taking place. The opera will be performed at the Meeting House on June 9th at 3 p.m. 

“This opera was such a joy to create,” Dr. Mitchell says while talking about how his retirement years have been good to him. The Franklin Cable TV station will be videoing the performance and Mitchell will be interviewed on Franklin Public Radio, wfpr.fm, after the opera takes place.