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By Robert Wilder Blue

Carlisle Floyd

Carlisle Floyd has captured the American spirit in his operas as no other composer has attempted or succeeded in doing. He has written of preachers, politicians, drifters, witches and plain, ordinary folk. His characters are unique for their very American-ness and universal for the timelessness of their dreams, desires and dilemmas. Floyd’s operas reflect his background as a native of the south and the son of a Baptist minister. Possessed with an innate artistic curiosity from the beginning, he has been at various times in life a painter, a writer and a composer. Thus, his destiny would be to find a home in the theater, a place where all these pursuits could find expression. He writes both the music and libretti for his operas; he often directs them; he sometimes designs the sets as well. He calls his operas ‘musical dramas,’ perhaps reflecting a desire not to be defined too narrowly.

Over the past fifty years Mr. Floyd’s works have played somewhere in the U.S. almost every season; the past three years have been virtually an ongoing Floyd festival: not a single month has passed without one, if not two or three, of his operas seeing a performance. Yet of his twelve operas, he is known primarily for Cold Sassy Tree (2000), Of Mice and Men (1970) and Susannah (1955). Those acquainted with his work believe there are a few more that ought to get another look. USOPERAWEB chatted with Mr. Floyd at the beginning of the summer, principally to discuss some of his “other” operas.

The first thing on our minds, however, was his teacher, the oft-neglected American composer Ernst Bacon. We asked him about Bacon. “I studied with him from the time I was seventeen until I was twenty-one. He was a marvelous coach, although I don’t think he really had the patience to be a taskmaster or a teacher. Of course I studied piano with him primarily, but nevertheless you gleaned a great deal from being with him because he was very caught up in his own composing.

“He came of that group in the ‘30s and ‘40s that we might say today was almost militantly American – far more than I was at the time – which happens when a country is trying to establish its musical independence. He was strongly interested in American music and also serious musical theater. He was a vastly cultivated man, so he was a wonderful influence to have early in my life. He came from a privileged background: his mother was an Austrian baroness and his father was a well known scholar doctor. But he was strongly American and felt that we should develop our own culture out of our own materials. I was indoctrinated with that early on and it never occurred to me to question it. The only thing I remember questioning at all was his strong discouragement of using Italian tempo markings; he felt they should be in colloquial American English.”

Do you think his music is overlooked today? “There’s the Bacon society which is fostered by his fourth wife Helen Bacon, but I don’t know what kind of performances his music gets. He wrote symphonic music and some chorale music and he was published at the time I was with him by Schirmer. I don’t know whether any of his pieces are still in print though. At this point I haven’t heard any of his music in so long I don’t know how I would view it personally. I knew that he had written an opera a year or so before I studied with him called Tree on the Plains, which I think was done locally in South Carolina. I’m not sure it was ever done beyond that, but I do know it was covered by Time magazine so it must have had some exposure. He had written a tremendous number of songs, so in the very beginning I started writing songs also. He was such an aficionado of Dickinson and Whitman and the other American poets and that fed my own love of literature.”

Americanisms

The word ‘American’ is often attached to a composer and his/her music as a descriptive adjective rather than a geographic one. Yet the panorama of American music can hardly be lumped into a single style or sound category (think Charles Ives, Elliott Carter, Stephen Foster, Steve Reich, Richard Rodgers, Duke Ellington, Virgil Thomson, Charles Griffes, Meredith Monk, etc.). What is meant by ‘American’ music? “I’m probably the worst person to ask. I was on a panel at Hofstra College last year and this question came up from someone in the audience: What is American music? Anthony Tomassini was on the panel and he gave the most satisfying answer I’ve come across (although I’m not sure it would satisfy very many musicologists who are searching for the final description). He felt that it was a kind of natural comfort with the vernacular which, like America itself, is diverse and regional; it’s not one particular set of sounds. And he said this was evident in Copland and certainly Bernstein in which you hear a very vivid kind of vernacular that seems totally natural. And he felt the same thing was true in my work. I’ve never really set out consciously to write ‘American’ music. I don’t know what that would be unless you mean the obvious Appalachian folk references in a good many of my pieces. I can tell you that when I’ve seen my operas in Europe they have always struck me as more American than when I hear them here. I can’t tell you what that phenomenon is.”

Cathy! Heathcliff!

Emily Brontë's tragic novel of doomed love in 18th century England served as the source for Floyd’s opera Wuthering Heights. (It is his only opera on a non-American subject.) Readers in 1847 gave a tepid reception to Ms. Brontë's blatantly un-Victorian depiction of extramarital passion. No matter; the story of Cathy and Heathcliff became required reading soon enough and achieved lionhood in William Wyler’s 1939 film starring Laurence Olivier (Heathcliff), Merle Oberon (Cathy), Geraldine Fitzgerald (Nellie) and David Niven (Edgar). Floyd’s operatic version premiered in Santa Fe on July 16, 1958, with Robert Trehy (Heathcliff), Phyllis Curtin (Cathy), Regina Sarfaty (Nellie) and Loren Driscoll (Edgar). The New York City Opera presented it next in its all-American 1959 spring season, again with Ms. Curtin who was joined by company stars John Reardon (Heathcliff), Patricia Neway (Nellie) and Frank Porretta (Edgar); Julius Rudel conducted. Productions followed within a year at Chautauqua Opera and Florida State University and then the opera dropped out of sight.

We asked Mr. Floyd how Wuthering Heights came to be. “This is kind of an interesting story: after Phyllis did Susannah, she asked me to do a piece for a Town Hall recital. I wrote what we referred to as a concert aria, like the Mozart concert arias that are not part of any opera. An actress friend of mine in college had told me about this monologue of Cathy’s that actresses used for an audition piece. It begins, ‘do you ever dream strange dreams…,’ and in it Cathy confides to her nurse, Nellie, of her love for Heathcliff and her great stress over her impending marriage to Edgar. I composed the concert aria verbatim from the Brontë novel. I was not at Phyllis’s recital but apparently it was very successful, so much so that some opera impresarios, among them Kurt Herbert Adler of San Francisco, came backstage and wanted to know about the rest of the opera. Phyllis told them there was no opera, that this aria was it. After that, there began to build some momentum for doing a full operatic version of Wuthering Heights which was then furthered by my publisher and agent at that time, Robert Holden at Boosey Hawkes, and John Crosby who had just founded Santa Fe Opera. They offered me a commission for Santa Fe and at first I said no because I thought it was too big an undertaking. But it was Wuthering Heights or nothing. I was encouraged by Phyllis, who was going to sing in it, and there were very pleasant pressures from all sides, so at that point I said, alright. It’s the only opera, by the way, where I’ve had the subject matter dictated to me.

“From the very beginning, I set out to create an atmosphere of gloom and foreboding in the music – after all it’s a very gothic novel. Obviously it was not an opera that permitted any ‘Americanisms.’ But I welcomed that; after Susannah, I was getting offered a lot of American scripts and I didn’t want to get completely locked into that.

“The opera is very rarely done now. The last production I know of was with the Boston Lyric Opera back in 1993. It was interesting to get back to it – I hadn’t heard it for probably 25 years or more – and to find that it still works. It’s a kind of a transitional piece between Susannah and the operas that came later. It gave me a chance to write a through-composed opera and it’s probably closer to the operas that came later, but there’s still enough of Susannah to recognize that it is mine. But I liked it and I did not remember that it was as lyrical as it was. I think it’s worth doing and Phyllis thinks so too. If I felt that one of my operas did not come off I would certainly say so; but I think it works. Considerable revision was done between Santa Fe and New York; I rewrote the entire third act. I made one short cut in it in ’93 when I did it in Boston which I think made one scene ending more effective, but otherwise I don’t see any reason to tinker with it.”

The Grandest Opera

Floyd’s fifth opera, The Passion of Jonathan Wade is set in Columbia, South Carolina, at the beginning of the Reconstruction era. The story is Floyd’s own invention: after the end of the Civil War, Jonathan Wade, a northern occupation officer, is sent to carry out the U.S. Government’s reconstruction efforts in Columbia. He encounters immediately, however, the complications inherent in imposing his northern ideals on this southern society. He falls in love with the local judge’s daughter, Celia Townsend, and thus is born the conflict that eventually brings his destruction.

The opera premiered at New York City Opera on October 11, 1962 (in the middle of the civil rights movement), with Theodor Uppman in the title role; Phyllis Curtin was Celia Townsend, Norman Triegle was her father Judge Townsend, and Miriam Burton played Nicey, the Townsend’s housekeeper; Julius Rudel conducted. The opera was given two performances and shelved. In the late ‘80s on the suggestion of Julius Rudel, Houston Grand Opera General Director David Gockley offered Mr. Floyd a commission to revise the opera. The new version was seen first in Houston on January 18, 1991, with Dale Duesing as Jonathan Wade, Sheryl Woods as Celia Townsend, Julian Patrick as Judge Townsend and Debria Brown as Nicey; John DeMain conducted. The production traveled to San Diego, Seattle and Miami, but since 1996 the opera has not been revived by any other company.

Jonathan Wade is both intimate drama and grand history pageant, reminding one of Verdi’s Don Carlo. “I was about to say that it’s my Don Carlo but I thought it best somebody else said that. Of all my operas, it is the one that approaches grand opera scale, not by intent, but by what was necessary to get the piece on the stage. It’s a very big canvas and there’s a lot compressed to its three-and-a-half hours.

Historically, it’s an era that fascinates me and one that’s not too well known in this country; we know the Civil War better than the Reconstruction. But, I didn’t want it to be a history lesson. I wanted it to be colorful and authentic, but at the same time I wanted to focus on the central character and the characters around him. I don’t think I had the skill as a librettist in 1962 to really bring off a work as complex as that and to make it credible. The whole thing was so hurried. There was not any time for much reflection or to tweak it beforehand; we just had to get it on the stage. So much of the libretto and music were redone that we called it a second version rather than a revision because it was too extensive.

“I’m very happy with the final version. The characters are a great deal more fleshed out now. Things happened too fast in the first version and the characters were too black and white so that we knew too much about them too soon rather than having them evolve over time. For a work as complex as that it’s necessary to track characters all the way through an opera. If you’re dealing with more than one or two characters, it’s very easy to forget that the others have lives of their own that feed into the story and the central characters’ lives. In Jonathan Wade you had to almost do a diagram of Jonathan’s relationships with the surrounding characters. And you had to bring it in within a reasonable amount of time. I will never take on that many characters in one opera again because it is such a huge challenge. But, I think I finally succeeded to feel that I had made each character real.”

Are its size and scope a barrier to getting Jonathan Wade performed now? “Oh yes, sadly, because it’s one of my best pieces in terms of my own satisfaction with it. But it does require a big investment of personnel.”

The Witches of Salem: Another Point of View

Bilby’s Doll premiered at Houston Grand Opera on February 27, 1976, with Catherine Malfitano in the title role; Joy Davidson, Jack Trussel, Alan Titus, Titus Thumb and Samuel Ramey also appeared and Christopher Keene conducted. The opera traveled to Omaha later in the year but has been presented only once since, in 1989, by National Music Theater Network. Mr. Floyd found his story in Esther Forbes’ 1927 book A Mirror for Witches. “I always felt a great fondness for the book. It was a dif

ferent take on the Puritans and that’s what fascinated me about it. There’s somewhat of a correlation to Jonathan Wade in that in both instances I was choosing a subject matter that tries to depict the period more accurately, rather than the history-book version we have come to believe. I was interested in what was really going on in Salem at that time and I resolved to investigate this seemingly unorthodox treatment of the people and the period. I discovered that Forbes’ presentation was accurate. Our distortions of the people and the period can be credited in large part to nineteenth century revisionist accounts that were more in keeping with then current pieties. But they ignored the more human side of these people. We think the Puritans always dressed in black and white, which of course they didn’t. They loved what they called’ fad’ colors – very bright colors. And there were other differences in perceptions and comments that gave one a very different view of them.

“I’d looked at the material initially in the fall of 1956 after the New York premiere of Susannah. Two Broadway producers had the rights to the book and approached me to do it as a Broadway musical. We agreed from the start that it should be given a more serious musical treatment and I set to work on the book. But we came to a parting of the ways fairly quickly when the potential backers wanted a more conventional musical comedy setting. From time to time my publisher, Bob Holton, would check on the rights but they remained under option for a Broadway musical version. I had to wait until the rights had expired from the producers before getting my hands on it and that came in 1973 when David Gockley wanted to commission an opera for the bicentennial. I wrote a completely new libretto; the only remaining vestige from my original version was the opera’s title, Bilby’s Doll.”

Backstage moment: Carlisle Floyd and Catherine Malfitano, Bilby's Doll, Houston Grand Opera, 1976. Photo courtesy of HGO.

We found it notable that in the year when the country was occupied with glorifying the U.S., Mr. Floyd chose a story that drew attention to its darker past. In an essay written at the time, Floyd said, “Why then choose Bilby’s Doll for the Bicentennial? ... [T]o begin with, let me quickly affirm the obvious: Like any other composer of opera, I choose a subject not for polemical reasons, but because it contains vivid characters in highly charged dramatic situations. Coincidentally, however, I believe the opera has a comment to make on our national character and destiny....

“Doll Bilby lived in a world firmly committed to the creation of whatever was functional and of practical use: the products of men were judged ultimately in terms of their utility. Consequently, the Puritans proscribed the arts and suspected all manifestations of human imagination, spirit and need. Doll Bilby, irrevocably committed to precisely these same manifestations, was doomed to collide with such a society and in the end she became its victim. These Puritan constraints have filtered down to us today (although they are certainly less virulent than they have been in previous generations)... and we have paid a bitter price for such attitudes – namely the stunting of our own cultural growth through devaluing and discounting of our artists.... [Yet,] our most intimate contact with civilizations long since dust has been through the art which has survived them.”

Today Floyd says, “Of all my operas, it’s my personal favorite in some ways. It has a particular place in my heart. I don’t think it will ever be a popular success the way Susannah or Cold Sassy Tree are because of the subject matter. It probably seems too remote – less immediate. But it’s a piece that touches me a great deal – it always has. And I think it contains some of my very best writing. Dramatically speaking it was wonderful material to work with. The orchestral writing is as advanced harmonically as anything I’ve ever done, if not more so. I think it’s a more demanding piece musically than anything else I wrote, except perhaps Of Mice and Men. But Doll is a very strenuous role both vocally and dramatically; I suppose it’s probably the most taxing role I’ve ever written for a soprano. Catherine Malfitano did it initially and she was absolutely perfect for it.”

Back to Politics: A Modern Morality Tale

Willie Stark creative team (from left) director Hal Prince, Carlisle Floyd, conductor John DeMain, and HGO general director David Gockley. Photo courtesy of HGO.

Robert Penn Warren’s 1946 novel All The King’s Men was the inspiration for Floyd’s penultimate opera Willie Stark. Warren’s novel presents a fictionalized account of the rise and fall of the colorful Louisiana politician Huey Long. Hollywood offered up a film version in 1949 with Robert Rossen directing Broderick Crawford, Anne Seymour, John Ireland and Mercedes McCambridge. The opera had a promising beginning on April 24, 1981 at Houston Grand Opera with Timothy Nolen in the title role; Jan Curtis, Alan Kays, Julia Conwell and Don Garrard rounded out the cast; John DeMain conducted and Hal Prince directed. (Two other operas premiered in Houston during the same week: Philip Glass’s The Panther and Henry Mollicone’s Starbird.) Willie Stark traveled immediately to the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.; HGO revived it in 1984 and Opera Carolina and Shreveport Opera produced it in 1985.

In 1981, Floyd said, “The south has a very special kind of atmosphere... there’s more color, more specificity, more individuality in the extreme sense. Southerners seem to relish, and, in a way, protect their eccentrics – the people who seem outside the norm and yet personify the values of a close-knit formalized society.... Men [such as Huey Long] were highly educated, yet they found nothing antithetical in being educated and still having the common touch. They say about Huey Long that he saw no contradiction in quoting from Shakespeare along with a statement about blackeyed peas.... These men knew full well when to bring out the blackeyed peas.

“Right from the beginning, social juxtaposition established tension amongst the protagonists in Willie Stark. On the one hand there is the formal world of the Burdens, which does not presume on acquaintanceship, and on the other hand, there is Willie Stark. He is the usurper, the intruder who doesn’t stand on any kind of ceremony and whose behavior rips through the fabric of patrician society. Having grown up in the South, I felt totally comfortable working with these prototypical characters.”

Floyd told USOPERAWEB, “The story of Willie Stark fascinated me from the beginning because it was tackling the story of a man who outwardly has all the success one could possibly want and who is destroyed by his personal demons. His destruction is something that he creates himself, which I think we see happening to public figures all the time. People in very high places suddenly fall and we are always surprised because we don’t factor in the basic element that they’re humans and, therefore, they are flawed and have weaknesses that can overtake them. That’s what interested me in Willie Stark – the public man and the private man and the events he sets in motion because of his private need for vindictive triumph. The man obviously is very conflicted.”

After successfully transferring their productions of Scott Joplin’s Treemonisha and George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess to Broadway (1975 and 1976, respectively) HGO hoped to take Willie Stark to New York also; it wasn’t to be, however. The opera has a Broadway feel to it though – mostly because of the use of spoken word instead of recitative. It recalls the musical theater works of Marc Blitzstein, Kurt Weill and Leonard Bernstein. Floyd comments, “I tried a number of things – to use the voice so it was not strictly recitative or singing or spoken word. I tried a great deal of speaking on pitch and in rhythm – anything to try to ameliorate as much as possible the transition between speaking voice and singing voice and to do it with such consistency that the audience was never consciously aware of how the voice was being employed. (He would take up this affect again in Cold Sassy Tree.) That was, I would say, my bow to so-called musical comedy. The one thing abhorrent to Broadway producers is the idea of recitative; they’ve told me that so I’m speaking authoritatively on it. To them it seems highly artificial; they always want that very strong demarcation between speaking and singing, which I have always found very jolting aesthetically in Broadway musicals. I was trying, given the nature of the material, to do something that seemed very natural and easy but which bridged that gulf between the singing voice and the speaking voice and I think it worked quite well. Timothy Nolan, who played Willie, got quite caught up in it and began speaking it too much. The role is actually more sung that he ultimately did it, but he developed a real technique for it, as did some of the other singers. I also felt that the dramatic material itself, being as populist as it was, had musical comedy elements about it. But the point is that given its overall scope the piece would certainly belong in the opera house. Both Houston and New York City Opera been talking about doing a revival and I hope they can. Of all my operas I would say that’s the one most people submit as wanting to see it again.”

Following up on the opera/musical theater labeling confusion, we wondered what Mr. Floyd had to say on the subject. “This is a question I get asked so often. How do you make the distinction? I think it lies in the score – the way it is composed – and in the voices that are required to do the piece. Sometimes pieces come out of the Broadway musical tradition of dialogue and song. I remember that Harold Prince was doing [Stephen Sondheim’s] Sweeney Todd at the same time he was doing Willie Stark and Stephen and I met in his office one day. (I had known Stephen through work with the National Endowment.) He said to me, ‘well my new work is going to be 80 percent sung.’ And I said, ‘now that’s interesting Stephen, my new work is going to be 40% spoken.’ I think the point is I think we come from basically different traditions.”

Willie Stark was the first of Floyd’s opera to go through the workshop process, i.e., to be given a series of tryout performances similar to that of a Broadway musical or play. Is there benefit to be found in that process? “I would never want to do a new piece without it, if I possibly could. I find it enormously valuable – indispensable – just to be sure that that the pacing is what I think it is and that the scenes have the shape I think they have musically and dramatically. And if they don’t then we have to do something about it. Maybe it has something to do with writing the libretto as well as the music. But while a lot of composers profit from it greatly, others simply don’t want to involve themselves in that at all. With young composers, I don’t know if it’s terribly valuable because they don’t know how to use it. Frequently they’re so overjoyed at seeing their work on its feet that they have absolutely no objectivity about it. I would feel very deprived at this point if I couldn’t see a bit of a work on its feet first. If you are surrounded by colleagues you trust, be they producers, conductors or whomever, and if you can use their comments and responses creatively then I think it’s tremendous.”

The Outsider?

We pointed out to Mr. Floyd that almost everything we’d read about him since the 1950s referred to him as an outsider. In April 1999, David Gockley told Opera News, “If you’re not part of the Northeastern establishment, specifically the New York scene, you have no status. Because Floyd always lived and taught in Florida or Houston, he has been regarded as a regional figure, when in fact he is a national figure.” What is Mr. Floyd’s reaction to being called an outsider? “It’s saddening. There is truth in what David said and it may be perfectly reasonable that most of the important composers in our country are clustered in the Northeast. But I had the honor last year of being inducted into the American Academy of Art and Letters and so I can’t claim being an outsider for much longer, happily.

“It depends on what you mean by being an outsider. If you mean someone who doesn’t follow musical fashion I would certainly plead guilty to that. I found a certain kind of music congenial to me; it never occurred to me to really write music that was academically acceptable. I’m by no means the only so-called outsider; I think I have quite a bit of company these days. There is a whole generation of new composers who strongly reject the kind of doctrinaire attitude towards serialism that existed in the ‘60s or the ‘70s. It’s amazing how fast generations lose sight of other generations. One of the first things the young composers who come to work with me say is that they want to write music people will like, instead of gaining their credentials by being rejected by the audience. And basically I think that’s a thoroughly commendable attitude if it doesn’t mean pandering or so-called selling out. One has integrity to consider.

“It’s always been a curious thing that if something is successful with the audience it’s automatically suspect; because the reverse is to say that not to reach audiences is the greatest compliment an artist can receive. Back in the ‘50s, Winthrop Sargeant, the New Yorker critic and a man who wrote wonderfully but was very conservative in his attitudes, did a piece on what he called the ‘cult of the rejected,’ saying that the greatest accolade contemporary composers would seem to want would be to be excoriated by critics and rejected by the audience. It was a curious kind of turning defects into virtues.”

Renée Fleming in the title role of Susannah. Photo: Winnie Klotz/Metropolitan Opera (1999)

Two common conditions can be found in Mr. Floyd’s characters: the outsider (Susannah, Cathy in Wuthering Heights, George and Lennie in Of Mice and Men, Doll in Bilby’s Doll, Love Simpson and Rucker Lattimore in Cold Sassy Tree) and the person in conflict with him/herself (Olin Blitch in Susannah, Jonathan Wade and Celia Townsend in The Passion of Jonathan Wade, Willie Stark). Writers and other observers have a habit of looking for connections between the artist and his work, so we asked Mr. Floyd about these themes. “I suppose you run a quick thumbnail psychoanalysis. I think I grew up well into my teen years feeling something of an outsider – not for any reason other than my interests were different from those of my peers. Although I had all the normal interests – by that I mean I played on the basketball team and I headed the school paper – things of that nature – and held a few class offices. But I also developed very early a great love for music and literature and the theater and one doesn’t find too many of his peers who share those passions, at least in a small town in the south. Fortunately I was encouraged by my mother and to a lesser extent by my father. Socially I never was an outsider. I have never thought of the conflict element before frankly, but perhaps it was wanting to belong, certainly, and at the same time wanting to retain one’s own personality, one’s own identity, which I think is fairly human.

“The artist is something of an outsider in America. I have always felt that America does not value its artists, certainly not in the sense that the Europeans do. There is something inherent in our democracy that tends to want to level. America, because of our democratic background, is a little uncomfortable in the presence of someone who is distinctly superior in whatever way, except the great moneymakers – I mean, we love that. We are a curious nation because on the one hand, there is no nation that extols the nonconformist, the rugged individual, more than we do. And yet there is a huge pressure in our society toward conformity. That same kind of duality exists in the oppression of the arts. Anyone who creates something new or does something different artistically is going to be singled out. America tends to worship the modest talent, because, again, it doesn’t put us in an uncomfortable position vis-a-vis the artist. We tend to feel comfortable with performing artists like Pavarotti, for instance, whereas Domingo, in my opinion, is a vastly superior artist. I find all these contradictions kind of maddening. I’m sure that’s about as clear as mud, isn’t it?”

Does Opera Matter?

Is opera relevant to our lives today? “I think it can be. I’m thinking of what makes anything relevant. We tend to think, well, is it part of our political or social theme or is it just an extension or is it just fu fu? The same thing can be said of ballet. Is ballet relevant? I don’t know but it seems to me opera is just as relevant as an expressive art as anything else.

“People very much undersell an audience’s capacity to respond to stories and characters they can identify with directly. Something as colloquial as Dead Man Walking and as real as prison life and everything that it’s involved with, is very much a part of our daily scene and something that immediately draws people on the stage. They’re not used to that in traditional opera. It’s very easy to distance yourself from period pieces because either through costuming or whatever, they don’t seem to be as much of our time. But I think that if an American audience is given a serious musical theater piece that is well produced, dramatically gripping and wonderfully acted, they’ll respond to it. I’ve seen it over and over again in productions of my operas. I remember a production of Of Mice and Men in Phoenix, a woman came up to me afterwards at an opening night party and said, ‘this is really real.’

“The Met people were very surprised that Susannah did so well at the box office. I think the last two or three performances were completely sold out. And for some reason they didn’t expect that at all. Now obviously the star power involved – Sam [Samuel Ramey] and Renée [Fleming] – had a lot to do with it too. When Cold Sassy Tree was done in Houston it was practically packed. So the idea of new operas being box office poison is no longer valid. I was very pleased that Susannah was done at the Met because it conferred on it a kind of museum status. But I felt the critical response was a little foolish. I didn’t read the reviews but I certainly heard about them. It was a little after-the-fact; after all, it was the same opera that was done at City Opera forty-five years before.”

Does Susannah’s continuing resonance have to do with the story, the music, or the combination of both? “All of the above. You can’t possibly predict what will last or not. But once you attempt to write for the ages, you’re doomed. I think anything that is expressed directly and as honestly as possible will last. You know, I’ve been enormously pleased with Susannah’s staying power over the years, coming up on fifty years now. I think that any work that depends on a manner of presentation or that is mannerist rather than direct will tend to date fastest. Susannah doesn’t depend on that. But I don’t know how any of my operas will play in twenty years. It will have a lot to do with the fashions of the time and what people respond to. Having lived as long as I have, I have noticed that people always respond to something that is human and direct without apology. Certainly that’s the staying power of the Williams and Miller plays that came out in the ‘50s. I don’t think anybody nowadays talks about the expressionistic thrust of Death of a Salesman. The main thing that sustains it is the fact that it is profoundly human.”

What are your observations on the progress of American opera from Susannah to the present? “There has been a formidable development in the last twenty or thirty years, partly because of the advancement of supertitles. Now we have – what? – 130 companies in the country? The performances of my works in the last ten years are probably equal to all the previous years put together. There are just so many venues now and there is a completely new public for opera that’s grown up outside of the traditional core opera public. There is a new and very enthusiastic audience and that’s what I find very contradictory in the fact that opera is given so little attention in the national press. Time magazine it seems to me does not have regular music critics any longer. Even the New Yorker doesn’t. Those national magazines used to have a tremendous influence on publicizing new pieces, certainly in terms of helping launch Susannah and Of Mice and Men. Now I look in vain in Newsweek or Time for anything that has to do with serious or concert music or opera. And I don’t know why they would no longer have resident music critics at those magazines, except because of what they see to be lack of public interest. I think New York magazine still has Peter G. Davis. The New York Times has made itself more current by giving more and more space to so-called pop music. In terms of really publicizing and making it important to the American public, we don’t have access to a national forum that we had in those days through the news magazines which were the television news of the time. It’s very disturbing to me that we’ve sort of been pushed to the corners.”

The Final Three

What are your desert island operas? “I will exclude all of mine [he laughs]. Peter Grimes, The Coronation of Poppea, Otello – oh, I can’t do this because immediately I think of things I’ve omitted – Carmen and The Marriage of Figaro, probably.”

Is there an operatic composer you dislike? “I’m not a great fan of the bel canto composers. I love Rossini in the comic vein but not I’m a great fan of Donizetti or Bellini, even though I love what he does melodically. I thought you were going to ask me something different. Is there a composer who I thought very much underrated? And I would certainly say Massenet; I think Manon is a marvelous piece.”

Why do you say he’s underrated. “I don’t think he’s given the credit he’s due. He’s a real musical dramatist. He’s a marvelous craftsman. If you just listen to Manon what he does melodically to characterize her at different stages of her life, it’s a work of a man of the theater.”

See also the USOPERAWEB Spring 2001 feature on Cold Sassy Tree and Carlisle Floyd.