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Lindbergh Flies Again in New Opera

By Robert Wilder Blue

On June 9, 2002, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis will present the world premiere of Loss of Eden, the third opera by the composer/librettist team Cary John Franklin and Michael Patrick Albano. USOPERAWEB spoke with Mr. Franklin last winter about his operas and Charles Lindbergh and other matters.

Cary John Franklin was born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, into a musical family. "At age five, my mother stuck an accordion on my chest. She was a performer herself and taught the entire family. Music was part of our lives. I think that's lost for a lot of people these days because not everybody has the opportunity to play music when they're young. I have a younger brother and sister and we had a little accordion trio and played for parties and that kind of thing. We can still do it - just a couple of weeks ago we had a reunion of the trio playing for benefit. I've actually played quite a bit of serious music written for the accordion and I've written a song cycle for accordion and voice and a chamber piece for accordion and an ensemble of seven instruments.

"Anyway, in school I progressed to playing the piano, singing in the choir, playing trombone in the orchestra and the band and that kind of stuff, but I didn't think about going into music as a career. When I went on to college I did a double major in music and chemistry for the first couple of years. But then it got to the point where the bug was too strong to ignore and I knew I wanted to make music my chosen profession. I went to Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, where I was fortunate to work with one of the foremost choral directors in this part of the country, Dale Warland. I sang in his choir and as a student, I wrote a piece for the choir that we toured around the country. Also at the time there was a program with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra where they would come into the college and read student works. I was really lucky with some of those first experiences because I had some fantastic ensembles to work with and it inspired me all the more to realize what you could do writing music.

"I'd always been involved in theater too. From high school on I'd been in musicals singing in the chorus and in college as an assistant director or music director. My first real opera experience was just out of college when I became the chorus master of the Minnesota Opera and I just fell in love with it. The music, the words, the set, the lights - there's a world that's created

that's new and different. I've always been taken by the fact that these elements all come together in opera. But really, my education in opera was working for the Opera Theatre of St. Louis. It was there, working in the house, that I really learned how it all works."

In 1992, Mr. Franklin collaborated with Mr. Albano on their first opera, The Very Last Green Thing. We asked how the idea for the opera had come about. "I had done some work in the education field and had worked with young people a lot. We sort of developed a notion that one way of getting kids interested in opera was to actually have them perform and be a part of it rather than to have professional singers come into the school and sing at the kids. There is not a lot of repertoire for that so Michael and I were approached by Opera Theatre of St. Louis to write a piece. The Very Last Green Thing is set in the future, the year 2300 or 2400 or something like that, and in this future world the environment has been destroyed, the kids are living in this hermetically sealed classroom and their teacher is an android. The kids go on a field trip and find a time capsule that contains things that were important to kids in 2002. We went into some inner city schools in St. Louis when we were putting the piece together and we asked the kids to choose items to put in a time capsule for kids their age to find 300 years from now. Initially they chose clothing or jewelry or tennis shoes or a CD of their favorite song. But in all instances they became more serious after a while and wanted to put in pictures of plants and animals because they were concerned that the kids of the future wouldn't have plants and animals. When the kids in the story find the time capsule there's a withered green plant in it and opera ends with the kids singing about this plant and wondering what its value was.

"The piece was very successful and went on to several other opera companies. I think it's a really effective way to give kids challenging material to work with. It gives them the opportunity to really put on a first-rate production; it's something they become very proud of and it stays with them."

Franklin and Albano's second children's opera premiered in the cafeteria of the St. Louis Juvenile Detention Center, or "Juvie." "OTSL asked us to do a second piece and for that we chose to go in a little different direction. It's called The Thunder of Horses. We adapted a Native American story that was compelling to us about a boy who is on a journey - a spiritual quest - and finds the gift of horses and brings those horses back to his people. That piece as well has been done by a lot of companies around the country."

We wondered if Mr. Franklin had felt compromised writing for children. "Not at all. I do a lot of educational programs and children's concerts with symphony orchestras too. These are basically for kids in the age range of ten to fifteen and at that point they really don't have any preconceived notions of what music should be or how difficult it is. There is a technical limitation of what the voices can do at that age - putting down notes they can actually sing. But, some of the music is quite complicated with patterns lying on top of each other and kids playing professional instruments and singing at the same time. And they pick this stuff up right away. The gratifying thing is that if you keep working with these kids it does an impact on them. Over the years some of these kids have come back to the opera as audience members because they realized that there was meaning in it and that it was something they wanted to be part of their lives."

Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh

The Crime of the Century

Charles Lindbergh (1902-1974) had been fascinated by airplanes since he was eight years old. He dropped out of the mechanical engineering program at the University of Wisconsin at age 20 and enrolled in flight school in Lincoln, Nebraska where he served as a mechanic, wingwalker and parachute jumper. (This was the Age of the Barnstormer, when county fairs and carnivals featured stuntflyers, parachute jumpers and other aerial daredevils.) Within a year he took his first solo flight and became a barnstormer. In 1924 he enrolled in the Army Air Service for further training and two years later distinguished himself by becoming the first airmail pilot between St. Louis and Chicago.

In 1926, the New York businessman Raymond Orteig offered a $25,000 prize to the first person to fly nonstop from New York to Paris. It was a challenge Lindbergh couldn't pass up. It took a year to raise the money needed to have a special monoplane constructed in San Diego. When it was finished Lindbergh dubbed it the "Spirit of St. Louis" and flew it nonstop to St. Louis and then on to Long Island, breaking records on both legs for transcontinental flight times.

Spring storms delayed his departure to Paris, but finally, on May 27, 1927, at 7:52 a.m., he took off from a wet runway in a plane carrying the barest minimum of necessities: sandwiches, water, maps and charts. He left the parachute and radio behind to make room for more fuel. Thirty-three-and-a-half hours later the "Spirit of St. Louis" circled the Eiffel Tower and then landed at Le Bourget Field. Lindbergh was an instant international hero and celebrity. "It was as if everyone saw in him something that they sought in themselves - a spirit of adventure and achievement in life. Somehow he represented a symbol of hope in a weary world, for there was something unique about his integrity, courage, and indifference to honors." (nationalaviation.org)

Upon his return to the U.S., Lindbergh undertook a three-month tour of the U.S., visiting all 48 states and the territory of Alaska, to be followed by a goodwill tour of Central America, the West Indies and Mexico. Here he met Anne Spencer Morrow, daughter of the American Ambassador. The two were married on May 29, 1929 in New Jersey. Charles taught Anne to fly (she was the first woman in America to earn a pilot's license) and she became his copilot, radio operator and navigator; the two flew to five continents, charting routes for commercial air travel. In 1930, Anne gave birth to their first child, Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr.

Richard "Bruno" Hauptmann

The press was relentless in hounding the Lindberghs. To escape the constant scrutiny, they built a house on 390 acres in a remote area of New Jersey. On March 1, 1932, sometime between 8:00 and 10:00 p.m., Charles Jr. was kidnapped from his crib. In response to three ransom notes the Lindberghs paid $70,000 to the supposed kidnappers, but the baby was never returned. On May 12, its body was discovered in the woods, four miles from the Lindbergh estate. It was partially decomposed; no useful physical evidence was retrieved and the subsequent autopsy provided no additional clues. Two years the later, the appearance of one of the gold bank notes contained in the ransom money led to the arrest of an illegal German immigrant, Richard "Bruno" Hauptmann. A year later he was found guilty and sentenced to death. But from the beginning there was doubt as to whether Hauptmann had actually committed the crime and to this day there remains surrounding the "Crime of the Century" more mystery than certainty.

Loss of Eden

After the success of their first two operas, Charles McKay, General Manager of Opera Theatre of St. Louis, offered Franklin and Albano a commission for the main stage. His only request was that they choose an American subject. "We both did a lot of reading of American playwrights, we looked at various stories and kind of independently started playing with the idea of Charles Lindbergh, partly because of his association with St. Louis. Also, I had lived in Minnesota for twenty years and Charles Lindbergh grew up in Minnesota so there was another connection for me. When we were looking for a co-commissioner for the project, the Plymouth Music Series of Minneapolis came on board and the subject made a logical connection for the two organizations.

"Once we had settled on an idea and begun developing a scenario we showed it to Colin Graham who helped us on developing the libretto. We read all the books and clippings and we went to the archives in St. Louis where there's a huge collection of Lindbergh memorabilia and papers. It became clear that this was going to be more than just a story about Charles Lindbergh and in the first take we tried to be so historically correct, we put too many characters and too much information and it became like a documentary. It frankly wasn't very good theater. But after we began getting more involved with the Hauptmanns and Lindberghs and the tragedy that came upon them, it became more interesting to us. We like to talk about the piece as the imagined conversations of the people in the story based on historical events. We have basically kept the main historical facts in place. There are two couples: Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, famous and wealthy, getting married, having a baby, having their own version of the American dream; and on the other side Bruno and Anna Hauptmann, a young German immigrant couple seeking their own version of American dream. The lives of these two couples intersect with the kidnapping of the baby and the trial and in the end everybody loses.

"With four main characters in the show I wanted four different voice types that would give a wide range of tessitura to work with. The thing that was clear to me from the beginning was that Lindbergh was going to be a baritone. And I kind of liked the idea of the tenor being the dark character, or the villain character, which is contrary to the operatic heritage. Then I liked the idea of the baritone and mezzo voice together and the soprano and tenor voice together as couples and ended up with Anne Morrow Lindbergh being the mezzo and Anna Hauptmann as the soprano.

"We've had the opportunity to do a couple of different workshops on the piece so that Michael and I could revisit things and make some changes to the libretto and in the structure of the piece. We have also worked with Colin and Steven Lord; both gentlemen have a lot of experience in theater and especially with Colin there's a lot of experience premiering new work. We would be fools not to accept some advice. This process is really a matter of knowing the people you're working with and trusting their ideas and trying them out to see if they make sense. When I started writing the first children's opera I thought I was going to deliver the perfect score at the deadline and there would be no more changes. At that point I thought that workshops were silly. But for me it's a matter of actually doing it a few times, and because Michael is also staging it, to be able to work on things in advance, adding extra music in order for something to happen in the staging and that sort of thing. It's almost impossible to make major changes once you're in rehearsal. I think the pieces have always come out stronger because we've had a chance to make adjustments during the workshops."

Are the more operas in the future? "I would like to do more. Michael and I are working on another children's opera for Washington Opera. As I've said throughout my entire life, I always end up coming back to the theater somehow. It's been a draw and it's something that's important to me and something I want to be able to continue to do. It's just so time consuming though. I've spent the last two months just proofing and correcting parts and vocal scoring. It really limits the other things you can do. I'm hoping that this piece will be successful enough that somebody else would ask me to write something, but I don't need to do one right away."

We pointed out that many of the great opera composers didn't hit their stride until their third or fourth operas. "That's true. That is the unfortunate side of the business now because if you don't have a successful piece right away it's going to be difficult for other companies to want to put their necks out for you. Every opera company in the world can tell you of the piles of scores they have in their offices, which means that there are a lot of disappointed composers. But on the other hand I'd like to think that if there is some value to these pieces, somehow they are going to find their way into production and get heard, like the cream rising to the top. But that's being very idealistic about it.

"I'm encouraged about the future of opera. I've been fortunate enough to have opportunities so I don't look at it as a dire situation. Opera Theatre of St. Louis does a new piece almost every year. Other companies are trying to make a commitment too and it's just a matter of the fortitude of the managers or boards of directors that if one piece doesn't happen to be a hit, it shouldn't diminish all the other efforts."