Chapter 29

Opera in the United States

AT THE BEGINNING of the twentieth century, Oscar Hammerstein challenged the unrivaled domination of opera production at New York City’s Metropolitan Opera House by building the Manhattan Opera House. Describing himself as “the little man who’ll provide grand opera for the masses,” Hammerstein planned to stage a repertoire similar to that of the Metropolitan, but with better quality productions and at prices low enough to attract music lovers from all walks of society. The Manhattan Opera House opened on December 3, 1906, with Bellini’s I Puritani, and for the next several years this opera company gave New Yorkers some exceptionally fine productions, with works ranging from Louise, Pelléas et Mélisande, Carmen, and Le Jongleur de Notre Dame to Strauss’s Salome and Elektra. So successful was the New York enterprise, Hammerstein built a similar theater in Philadelphia. By 1910 the rivalry between Hammerstein’s two opera houses and the Metropolitan Opera had become so costly for both companies one of Hammerstein’s sons secretly negotiated the sale of the Philadelphia operation to the Metropolitan company and declared, as part of the sale agreement, that Hammerstein could not produce operas for a period of ten years in New York, Boston, Chicago, or Philadelphia.

All this took place shortly before a major event was to occur at the Metropolitan Opera. On December 10, 1910, the world premiere of Puccini’s “American” opera The Girl of the Golden West (La fanciulla del West) was staged at the very opera house that heretofore had looked with disdain on operas in English or operas by American composers. The libretto, drawn from David Belasco’s play of the same title, is set during the California gold rush era and tells of the triangular love affair of Minnie, the owner of a saloon in a mining town in the Old West, an outlaw, and a sheriff.¹ Unlike so many of Puccini’s operas, which end with the tragic death of the heroine, this opera offers a happy ending, with the heroine and the outlaw riding off together to begin a new life. The score differs from earlier Puccini operas in that the flow of musical material does not pause for lyrical set pieces, a feature that may have prevented it from being as popular as some of his other works for the stage.

Still preponderant in American music at the beginning of the twentieth century were German influences, but by this time composers were more thoroughly trained, more ambitious, versatile, and productive, and they were speaking a more authoritative musical language. Nevertheless, it is worth remarking that neither of the two leading composers in this generation, Charles Martin Loeffler (1861–1935) and Edward MacDowell (1860–1908), wrote an opera. Among the principal opera composers of this generation were Walter Damrosch (1862–1950),² Charles Wakefield Cadman (1881–1946), and three pupils of George Whitefield Chadwick—Frederick Shepherd Converse (1871–1940), Henry Hadley (1871–1937), and Horatio Parker (1863–1919). Their operas had the good fortune to be written at a time when the Metropolitan Opera had started actively seeking works by American composers, even staging a competition for that purpose. Converse’s The Pipe of Desire (Boston, 1906) was the first American opera to be presented at the Metropolitan Opera (1910)—a work in one-act, with a pleasant, tuneful score showing some influence of impressionism. Another of his operas, The Sacrifice, was given at Boston in 1911. Neither opera had a revival. Hadley’s operas include Azora, Daughter of Montezuma (Chicago, 1917) and Cleopatra’s Night (New York, 1920); both were written in a sound conservative style, but only the latter achieved some success, with multiple performances in the 1920 and 1921 seasons of the Metropolitan Opera.

Cleopatra’s Night, however, was not the first American opera to have performances in two consecutive seasons at the Metropolitan Opera. That distinction went to Cadman’s Shanewis, or The Robin Woman, presented there in the 1918 and 1919 seasons. Cadman’s interest in the music of Native Americans, some of which he recorded and published, extended to the authentic tunes he introduced in Shanewis. The score for this opera has an attractive, if superficial, melodic vein, but is slight in substance and rather awkward in dramatic details. The same composer’s A Witch of Salem (Chicago, 1926) enjoyed a modest number of performances.

Mary Carr Moore (1873–1957) also showed interest in Native American material. Her opera The Flaming Arrow (San Francisco, 1922) tells of a Zuni chief whose land has been laid waste by a drought. When a young Hopi brave asks to marry the chief’s daughter, the chief consents, but only if the rains come before “the moon leaves the rim of the hillside.” Fortunately for the lovers, the rains do come, but if they had not, the brave would have been killed by a poisoned arrow. Moore wrote a total of six operas, but only four had professional performances.³

Horatio Parker’s two prizewinning operas, Mona (New York, 1912) and Fairyland (Los Angeles, 1915), are regarded by many as significant American operas that have been unjustly ignored.⁴ The neglect is certainly not due to any technical shortcomings in the scores, which are sound in craftsmanship, large in conception, distinguished in musical ideas, and well planned for theatrical effect. But the librettos are sadly old-fashioned. Mona, a sufficiently good drama in essence, is markedly in the Romantic style of its day, with a scene laid in ancient Britain and the whole obviously owing much to Tristan und Isolde. Fairyland is one of those combinations of whimsy, symbolism, and vague pantheistic aspiration such as are found in the fairy operas of Rimsky-Korsakov or in Converse’s Pipe of Desire; and Parker’s music is likewise typical of the late Romantic period. Mona is a slightly modernized Tristan, with the same sort of continuous symphonic structure, a system of leitmotifs, opulent harmony, chromatic melody, and avoidance of cadences that characterize its model. Fairyland is somewhat lighter in texture and more diatonic in harmony—Wagner leavened by a dash of late Strauss. Musically, the gravest accusation that can be made against either opera is that the same things had been said before; and it may be regretted that these works had the misfortune to come at a moment when tastes in musical matters were on the verge of radical change.

Part of that change was fostered by the variety of musical entertainment being offered in the theaters of New York City. The advent of Franz Lehár’s Merry Widow at New York’s New Amsterdam Theater in 1907, for example, had a profound influence upon the future growth of operatic productions in America. Hailed by one of the city’s most respected music critics, Richard Aldrich, as the “merriest, maddest thing that has come out of the European continent in many a day,” this operetta soon appeared in theaters across the country. Many factors contributed to the craze for The Merry Widow, but none more so than the waltz, the highlight of Act II.

A major contributor to the American operetta repertoire was Victor Herbert (1859–1924).⁵ Of his many successful productions, Naughty Marietta (1910) had a particularly triumphant reception. The operetta is set in an American locale (eighteenth-century New Orleans), and although the plot is somewhat thin, the story provides ample opportunity for Herbert to showcase some of his most memorable songs. Another of Herbert’s very popular operettas is Babes in Toyland (1903), adapted for cinema and revived by major opera companies such as the New York City Opera. In 1904 George M. Cohan (1878–1942) brought to the Broadway stage the first American musical comedy, Little Johnny Jones, a patriotic work that included “Give My Regards to Broadway” and “Yankee Doodle Boy,” songs that have retained their popularity to the present day.

Operatic works created, produced, and performed by African Americans were also being staged with considerable success in New York and in many other cities as well, even in London. In Dahomey (1902) by Will Marion Cook (1869–1944) was one such work in which, like so many other African American theatrical productions, dance played a very important role. What was uniquely different about Cook’s use of dance was that the performers in his opera sang while they danced, a feature that attracted the attention of critics and producers alike, with Florenz Ziegfeld borrowing the idea for his own Ziegfeld Follies.

Ragtime was the hallmark of the music by another African American, Scott Joplin (1868–1917), whose move to New York in 1907 came about because he needed a different venue for staging his theatrical works. Joplin’s first opera, Guard of Honor, was performed at St. Louis in 1903 by his newly organized Scott Joplin Opera Company, but no trace of the score has been found. His second opera, Treemonisha, set to a libretto by the composer, was three years in the making. The piano-vocal score, completed in 1911, was published privately that same year and heard in a concert performance at a theater in Harlem in 1915, with Joplin accompanying the singers at the piano. Unfortunately, this performance was not enthusiastically received and even though a review of the published score had praised the work for being a true American opera, no theater manager could be persuaded to produce it during Joplin’s lifetime. Not until the 1970s did productions of Treemonisha begin to take place.⁶

In the writing of Treemonisha, Joplin did not attempt to mirror the type of European works that were being performed in America. Instead, he marked out his own path and created an opera that reflects black culture at the turn of the century as he experienced it. It was Joplin’s intention to glorify those aspects of black society that were worthy of being retained and to transform those aspects that were not. In the latter category belong superstition and black magic, aspects of the black culture that Treemonisha, a schoolteacher, transformed through education. Treemonisha was also a strong advocate for human rights. Although the opera’s libretto is somewhat stilted and the score filled with a plethora of different types of music (syncopated dance, barbershop quartet, gospel hymns, ragtime, popular ballads, and even a waltz), Treemonisha nevertheless holds a unique place in opera history, one that has only recently begun to be appreciated.

Other contributions to African American opera came in the form of musicals and revues, such as Shuffle Along (1921), a musical revue by Eubie Blake (1883–1983) and Noble Sissle (1889–1975). These two men also collaborated on several other musicals, including Chocolate Dandies (1924) and Shuffle Along of 1933. In all three, dance was an extremely important feature.⁷

Among the composers strongly influenced by African Americans and whose artistic endeavors were part of a movement that came to be known as the Harlem Renaissance were Jerome Kern (1885–1945), Virgil Thomson and George Gershwin, with their principal works written in the period between the two world wars. Kern composed music for a number of musical comedies prior to his collaboration with Oscar Hammerstein II, but in their creation of Show Boat (1927), based upon the novel of the same title by Edna Ferber, they took a bold step in producing a serious music drama that involved interracial relationships, a subject of questionable appropriateness for audiences of their generation. One need look no further than the opening scene—the singing of “Ol’ Man River” by an African American dock worker as he wearily goes about his seemingly endless task of loading cotton bales—to understand that Kern and Hammerstein had created a new type of entertainment, one in which the problems of American society could be brought to the fore in a Broadway musical and in which the conventional happy ending could be abandoned.

Perhaps it was sheer coincidence that in the same year of Show Boat’s critically acclaimed debut at the Ziegfeld Theater in New York, the Metropolitan Opera staged one of its more successful productions of an American opera—The King’s Henchman (1927) by Deems Taylor (1885–1966), with a libretto by Edna St. Vincent Millay. This opera and Peter Ibbetson (1931), also by Taylor, were commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera. Both were expert works in a mild late Romantic style with modern trimmings, well molded to the taste of that large majority of the opera-going public who are pleased with expressive melodies and sensuous harmonies that pleasantly stimulate without disturbing.

An important American historical opera Merry Mount by Howard Hanson (1896–1981) was also commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera and produced there in 1934. The score incorporates many ballets and choruses in a wild, implausible story of Puritan New England. It may be the extravagance of the libretto that has interfered with the full success of Merry Mount, or it may be a somewhat stiff, oratorio-like, undramatic quality and the generally static harmonic and melodic style of much of the music. Yet there is considerable variety of idiom: the love strains of Bradford’s aria “Rise up, my love” and the following duet, and the “Walpurgisnacht” ballets in Act II are particularly remarkable. The work as a whole is able, serious, and uncompromising—a compliment of the sort that opera audiences do not always seem to appreciate. Other American operas staged in the 1930s include yet another commissioned work of the Metropolitan Opera, The Emperor Jones (1933) by Louis Gruenberg (1884–1964), based on Eugene O’Neill’s play; it exploits a neo-primitive orchestra with drum rhythms and choral interludes.

George Antheil (1900–1959), an American living abroad from the 1920s until the early 1930s, created a momentary sensation in Germany with the 1930 premiere of his Transatlantic, one of the first American operas accorded a major production in Europe. The subject of Antheil’s satirical jazz opera, for which he wrote the libretto, focuses on an American presidential campaign with its correlative political vices.⁸ In this opera his style of writing is strident, propulsive, and strongly influenced by Stravinsky, as in the scenes at the campaign headquarters where the mechanistic music mimics the secretaries busily working at their typewriters. Ezra Pound found parallels between Antheil’s music, with its use of disparate blocks of sound, and Cubism, and he wrote of this relationship in a treatise on Antheil’s harmonic language. Others, like Aaron Copland, found little to praise in Antheil’s style of composition, and indeed Transatlantic had to wait until 1998 before any revivals were staged.

Two unique and enduring examples from the 1930s are Four Saints in Three Acts (1934) by Virgil Thomson (1896–1984) and Porgy and Bess (1935) by George Gershwin (1898–1937). Coincidentally, both operas had all-black casts for their premieres and both were commercially presented on Broadway. The hymn-like dignity and tuneful simplicity of Thomson’s Four Saints in Three Acts (it is actually in four acts) glimpses a vernacular of a different hue. Gertrude Stein’s text, written expressly for Thomson, represents an abstract threading together of words, out of which evolves a plotless libretto in praise of Spanish saints in general and of St. Theresa of Avila and Ignatius Loyola in particular. Stein viewed words as independent entities divorced from contextual association, mere sounds that, when placed in proper sequential configurations, would evoke meaningful interpretations. The following line from Four Saints in Three Acts is indicative of her style of writing: “Saint Therese [sic] in a storm in Avila there can be rain and warm snow and warm that is the water is warm the river is not warm the sun is not warm and if to stay to cry”⁹

Thomson’s Four Saints, completed in 1928, did not readily fit into any of the prevailing categories of operatic design, and he had difficulty finding any company willing to stage his work. In 1934 the Friends and Enemies of Modern Music took on the project and achieved a success with its production at the Hartford Athenaeum in Connecticut. The opera was sung, as intended, by an entirely African American cast. Why, one might rightfully ask, did Thomson choose an all-black cast for an opera about Roman Catholic saints and the Counter-Reformation? The composer provided this answer: “Blacks sing so beautifully, and they look so beautiful.”¹⁰ The Hartford production sparked enough interest that Four Saints soon thereafter had a run on Broadway and additional productions in Chicago, and has continued to enjoy numerous revivals.

Thomson’s second opera, again with a libretto created for him by Gertrude Stein, was The Mother of Us All, a work commissioned by Columbia University and first performed there in 1947.¹¹ This may be the most original American opera ever written and, some would argue, one of the best. When it was first performed, critics condemned the score for its simplicity and its tonal framework, for indeed it contains no trace of an atonal language and complex rhythmic textures, hallmarks of an avant-garde style. In this score, Thomson concentrated on musically conveying each word in as clear a fashion as possible, for he believed that the sound of the text could, and perhaps would, reveal its meaning.¹² The score draws inspiration from music Thomson had heard during his childhood days in Missouri—band concert music, Baptist hymns, and folk music played on the banjo. The theme of the opera is women’s suffrage, seen in the light of nineteenth-century American politics, an era when oratory was prized for its power of persuasion. Susan B. Anthony and Daniel Webster debate the issue of women’s rights in the opening act. Other well-known political figures parade in and out of the scenes (John Adams, Andrew Jackson and Ulysses S. Grant) and the audience is guided through the action by two characters, Gertrude S. and Virgil T, who serve as narrators. Politically charged rhetoric and humorous quips give way in the final scene of the opera to a very moving aria, “All My Life,” sung by “the spirit” of the deceased Susan B. Anthony. As the last notes of this monologue are sung, the curtain slowly descends, but since three measures of silence separate the penultimate chord of the plagal cadence in the orchestral accompaniment from the final C major chord, the audience literally holds its breath until the pianissimo cadential close has sounded.¹³

Scene from The Mother of Us All by Virgil Thomson. Gertrude S., Tracy Saliefendic; Susan B. Anthony, Joanna Johnston;Anne, Ruthann Manley. (PHOTO, © 1998 GEORGE MOTT. COURTESY OF GLIMMERGLASS OPERA, COOPERSTOWN, N.Y.)

George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess is true folk opera, the vernacular of the black culture skillfully communicated in sung recitative and in songs patterned after the traditional spirituals.¹⁴ The source for the story is Porgy, a 1925 novel by DuBose Heyward that Gershwin read with interest a year after its publication. In 1927 Heyward, with the help of his wife, Dorothy, dramatized the novel, and its successful performances in this form caused yet another transformation of the text in the 1930s. This time Porgy was to become a musical theater work. The idea for such a project was finalized in 1933, when DuBose Heyward, Ira Gershwin, and George Gershwin signed a contract for this purpose: DuBose was to write the libretto; Ira was to provide the lyrics (although DuBose was deeply involved in writing lyrics, too); and George, the music. The title was changed to Porgy and Bess to distinguish the musical adaptation from Heyward’s novel and play. Into this operatic project, Gershwin injected his long-held interest in the blues, jazz, and ragtime to create an American masterpiece.

The setting for the opera is the 1920s in a section of Charleston, South Carolina, known as Catfish Row, where its inhabitants daily experience extreme poverty, love, sex, religion, and violence, and where the Gullah dialect is spoken. In place of the spirituals that Heyward called for in his play, Gershwin substituted newly composed songs, but he seems not to have escaped the influence of the spirituals, for “Summertime” (sung in Act I, scene i) is certainly suggestive of “I Feel Like a Motherless Child.” The communal songs sung by the chorus, representing the Catfish Row residents (who maintain a presence on stage throughout much of the opera), play an extremely important role, for they give voice to the thoughts and feelings of the community in which the named characters are an integral part. The lyrics of at least one number also gave voice to the feelings of those attending performances in the late 1930s. That number was Porgy’s banjo song “I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin” (Act II, scene i), which surely must have resonated with those who had experienced and perhaps were still experiencing the Great Depression.

The Broadway premiere of Porgy and Bess took place at the Alvin Theater in New York in October 1935 to mixed reviews. For the most part, the work was enthusiastically received by the audiences, but it puzzled the critics who were at a loss to define its genre—was it an opera or a Broadway musical? That question has yet to be answered, for since its inception, Porgy and Bess has been variously considered a folk opera,¹⁵ a musical comedy, a movie musical, and most recently grand opera, after its productions by some major opera companies, including New York City Opera and the Metropolitan Opera. Gershwin drastically cut his original score for the New York premiere, and at the time of a 1941 production, spoken dialogue replaced the sung recitatives. In 1976 the Houston Opera Company produced Porgy and Bess, proclaiming the production represented “the complete unabridged version brought to the stage for the first time,” for it was based upon Gershwin’s short score, the holograph orchestration, and the published piano-vocal score—all of which were prepared before any of the actual staged productions of the 1930s took place and therefore did not reflect the extensive revisions authorized by Gershwin.¹⁶

THE 1930S ALSO SAW the first operas by Aaron Copland (1900–1990)¹⁷ and Douglas Moore (1893–1969). Copland’s The Second Hurricane (1937) was designed for performance by students enrolled in the Professional Children’s School and the Henry Street Settlement Music School in New York, and by amateur adults cast in the adult roles. The story is set in the midwestern United States and focuses on young people of different personalities and ethnic backgrounds who learn the value of cooperation in the face of a natural disaster. Included in the score are songs, such as the American Revolutionary song “The Capture of Burgoyne”(1777), and choruses to be sung by students and their parents. Orson Welles directed the initial production. Leonard Bernstein prepared a different version of The Second Hurricane for a 1960 television production, and there have been revivals of the staged version, including one at the Henry Street Music School in the mid-1980s.

The only other opera Copland wrote was The Tender Land, representing his contribution to the folk opera repertoire that had become so prevalent in American theaters by the 1950s.¹⁸ The libretto, prepared by Horace Everett (pseudonym for Erik Johns), recalls mid-nineteenth-century ideals of a rural society, where country living was seen as the path to moral regeneration. It tells a story about a midwestern farm family during the depression of the 1930s. Martin and Pop, two drifters seeking work, are hired by the Moss family to help with the spring harvest. Martin falls in love with Laurie, the older of the Moss family’s two daughters,¹⁹ and at a party attended by both of them the night before Laurie’s graduation from high school, they express their love for each other (in a duet) and make plans to leave the farm together the next morning. In the course of the night, Martin has second thoughts about taking this innocent young girl away from her family and causing her to miss her graduation. He therefore hastily departs before dawn, but when Laurie discovers what has happened, she also takes leave of the farm and the rural community that has nurtured her, thwarting her parents’ dream of having her be the first in the family to graduate from high school.

Copland received a commission from the National Broadcasting Corporation to write an opera for television, but when he presented The Tender Land for consideration, it was rejected. His search for a new venue in which to stage his opera resulted in an agreement with the New York City Opera; a production took place in the spring of 1954 and played to mixed reviews. Further revisions were undertaken for performances at Tanglewood and Oberlin College in 1954 and 1955, respectively. Not until 1987, however, did another reworking of the score generate the kind of enthusiasm one had come to expect from Copland’s other works written in his accessible American style.

Having been granted the composer’s permission, Alvin Brown and Murray Sidlin took the published (1955) version of The Tender Land, restructured it into two acts, added a few recognizable folksongs (in whole or in part) to the party scene of Act II, and introduced two of Copland’s own songs found in his Old American Songs, which were to be sung “spontaneously” by the guests at that same party. Brown heightened the dramatic interest by redefining the motivation for the characters’ actions. Sidlin reduced the scoring from a full orchestra to a chamber ensemble of about thirteen instrumentalists, thereby effectively creating a chamber opera that lent itself admirably to the intimate space of the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven, Connecticut.²⁰ There, to considerable acclaim, The Tender Land enjoyed a run of fifty performances during May and June 1987. As noted by Vivian Perlis in her article previewing the Brown/Sidlin production, Copland’s music stands for “the traditional values that Americans fear have been lost in today’s world.”²¹

Douglas Moore wrote orchestral and chamber works, art songs, and music for film and theater pieces, but he is best remembered as a composer of operas. All seven of his works in this genre are based on American subjects, of which The Devil and Daniel Webster (1939) is a prime example. This opera is in one long act and is reflective of the folk opera tradition; its mixture of folksong, hymn, and spoken dialogue aids in the painting of a New England scene.²² Stephen Vincent Benet’s libretto focuses on Jabez Stone, who has sold his soul to the devil. On the day of reckoning, Stone’s case is argued by Daniel Webster before a judge and jury representing the devil’s interests. In an appeal to the patriotic spirit of the assembled court, Webster successfully argues in the name of liberty and freedom. This distinctively American subject, presented with Moore’s penchant for good theatrical craftsmanship, reveals characteristics of his subsequent contributions to American opera.

With the end of the World War II, the production of operas by American composers increased significantly, enhanced by the marked rise of local opera groups, both amateur and professional, and the generally favorable opportunities for performance of new works in the United States.²³ In the forefront of this postwar activity was Moore, who continued to write operas that combined distinctly American subject matter and musical idiom with good theatrical craftsmanship. This is especially true of his highly successful opera The Ballad of Baby Doe, which had its premiere at the Opera House of Center City, Colorado, in 1956. The libretto by John Latouche is based upon an event that occurred in Colorado in the late nineteenth century. Horace Tabor owned a silver mine that brought him considerable wealth, but when the United States government took its currency off the silver standard, Tabor’s fortunes changed. The mine closed, and he and Elizabeth “Baby Doe” Tabor became impoverished. Tabor, however, never lost faith in the possibility that silver might once again be mined, thereby restoring the family’s wealth. It was for this reason that, shortly before his death, he asked his wife to keep watch over the mine so that no one could lay claim to the property. Thirty-six years later, Baby Doe was found frozen to death at the entrance to the mine, where she had daily maintained her vigil as promised. After the Colorado production, the opera was revised slightly, with the addition of an entire scene in Act II and an aria for Baby Doe, and in this form it was presented in 1958 by New York City Opera. Since that time, the opera has become a staple of the American opera repertoire.

Other operas by Moore include the 1951 Pulitzer Prize–winner Giants in the Earth (1951), which glorifies the pioneer spirit of the Norwegian settlers in the Dakotas as seen through the eyes of O. E. Rölvaag’s novel. This is the first opera by Moore that is full length and entirely sung. Some of his earliest operas were designed to be performed by, or for, young people: The Headless Horseman (1937), a high school opera in one act, drawn from the Washington Irving story;²⁴ The Emperor’s New Clothes (1949); and Puss in Boots (1950). Moore’s last opera, Carrie Nation (1966), focuses on a prohibitionist’s crusade in Kansas.²⁵

OPERAS OF SOCIAL PROTEST that had made their mark in Europe, with music in popular style, were echoed in the United States during the 1930s. Chief among them was Marc Blitzstein’s (1905–64) The Cradle Will Rock (1937), an opera that brought to the stage a story of industrial violence and its effect on the steel industry. Blitzstein completed his score in 1936, but by the time it was readied for a Broadway production, his opera’s libretto mirrored, all too faithfully, events unfolding in the steel and auto industries, where labor was attempting to unionize. The revolutionary tone of the opera was captured in the words of the closing number—“That’s a storm that’s going to last until the final wind blows… and when the wind blows … The Cradle Will Rock.” Unfortunately for Blitzstein, his opera was being sponsored by the Federal Theater Act, a program established during the New Deal era, and since the government did not want to appear to be taking sides over the union issue, the WPA agency decided to postpone the production. Blitzstein and his cast were not to be deterred and they challenged the government’s actions by opening their dress rehearsal to the public. Reaction to their defiant stance was swift; the theater was ordered closed and members of his orchestra and cast were forbidden by their union to appear on any stage not under the sponsorship of the WPA.

As crowds gathered in front of the theater on what was supposed to have been opening night, Blitzstein and his friends, among them Aaron Copland, hastened to rent another theater for the performance. The crowds were told to go to the Venice Theater uptown and by nine o’clock that evening Blitzstein—seated at a piano, alone on a bare stage—began performing the initial numbers, but as he moved through the score, he was joined by his singers who rose from their places in the audience. Some sang from the balcony; others sang from the orchestra section. Even the chorus, grouped in the front rows of the theater, was able to take part, and since the singers were not “on stage,” their participation was entirely legal. The excitement of this historic event was infectious, and for the next several weeks Blitzstein and his cast reenacted the improvised version of their opening night, to the delight of audiences who filled the Venice Theater.

The Cradle Will Rock is best described as a musical theater work; it is in ten scenes, has spoken dialogue alternating with dialogue supported by orchestral accompaniment, and songs in a cultured and clever jazz idiom. The score, dedicated to Bertolt Brecht, whose influence Blitzstein readily acknowledged, represents a bold step in the history of American opera in the sense that Blitzstein defied the stereotypical opera format, believing, as Aaron Copland so eloquently expressed it, that “every artist has the right to make his art out of an emotion that really moves him.”²⁶

Blitzstein’s No for an Answer (1941) is similar in aim and general musical style, though with a wider range of expression, and includes some fine choral numbers. Both works were presented in commercial theaters on Broadway, a further manifestation of Weill’s contention that music should be made accessible to the public. With Regina (1949), an opera based upon Lillian Hellman’s Little Foxes, Blitzstein moved closer to writing a true opera, for although spoken dialogue and Sprechstimme are still present, the work is designed for singers rather than actors. Once again a story was chosen that could be used to make a strong statement against capitalism: it is set in the era after the Civil War and depicts how greed can lead to the decay of society. From the dramatically gripping monologue in Act III to the more mundane passages spiced with gospel hymns and ragtime tunes, Blitzstein created a score that has worn well with time, as recent revivals confirm.²⁷ His works for the stage and his translation and adaptation (as a revised “Americanized” text) of The Threepenny Opera (1952), have secured for Blitzstein a significant place in the annals of American opera.²⁸

Kurt Weill’s Die Dreigroschenoper was first introduced to American audiences in 1931 by way of G. W Pabst’s film version. The fact that the film was in German no doubt accounted, in part, for its less than enthusiastic support from audiences and film critics alike during the initial showing in New York City. Early attempts to stage the Brecht-Weill opera for American audiences were not wholly successful. An English-language version entitled The 3-Penny Opera opened in 1933, first in Philadelphia and then in New York City, where it closed after only twelve performances. A second attempt was initiated by Eric Bentley in 1946, but this also proved to be of limited success. Not until Marc Blizstein became a true believer in the merits of Weill’s new type of music theater did an American production rival the triumphal reception of the 1928 Berlin premiere.²⁹ Unfortunately, Weill did not live to see Blitzstein’s English adaptation of Die Dreigroschenoper, brought to the Broadway stage in 1952.

During the fifteen years Weill lived in America, he tried to have the original German-language version of Die Dreigroschenoper performed in New York, but to no avail. A few months before his death, Weill received Blitzstein’s English lyrics for one of the songs from that opera “The Pirate Jenny.” Weill was so impressed with the adaptation, he encouraged Blitzstein to continue creating English lyrics for the entire opera. Blitzstein declined the offer because he was busy with his own compositions, but after attending Weill’s funeral several months later, he found himself ceaselessly drawn to the project.³⁰ By the end of 1951 his adaptation was completed, and among those interested in staging it were some Broadway producers and the New York City Opera, with the latter announcing that its forthcoming spring season would include the Blitzstein adaptation of The Threepenny Opera, “with English lyrics, and some new music.” This information unleashed a wave of protest from those implementing the McCarthy investigation of persons believed to be Communists or Communist sympathizers. On the basis of the opera’s past history, Kurt List, in an article in the New Leader, labeled it “a piece of capitalist propaganda” and called into question an institution willing to promote such a work.³¹ This controversy caused New York City Opera to postpone the production indefinitely, but Blitzstein, determined that his version should be produced, negotiated a concert performance, with Leonard Bernstein conducting, at the June 1952 Brandeis Festival. The work proved to be an outstanding success, and Blitzstein’s adaptation was praised as being faithful to Brecht’s German original. What followed was a highly acclaimed off-Broadway production in 1953 at the three-hundred-seat Theatre de Lys in Greenwich Village. The production was forced to close because the theater had been reserved for other productions in the 1954–55 season, but when the theater again became available in 1955, The Threepenny Opera resumed its successful run, achieving a total of 2,611 performances before the show closed in 1961. With its subsequent productions at New York City Opera and on and off Broadway, there is no doubt that this one work greatly influenced the future of American musical theater.³²

THE POSTWAR PERIOD WITNESSED the blossoming of the uniquely styled American popular opera of New York. This art form had been molded in the 1930s by native composers as well as by those who sought refuge in the United States during World War II. An example of the latter is provided by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht; they were driven out of Germany with the rise of Nazism and the subsequent outbreak of the war but eventually found a safe haven in the United States. Weill was the first to arrive; he came in September 1935 and remained until his death in 1950. Brecht came in 1941 and stayed until 1947, although he had previously visited the United States in the 1930s. There is no mistaking how Weill viewed the potential for his development in his newly adopted country. In an interview with a reporter from the New York Sun, he expressed two very salient points.³³ First, he made clear that he was writing music, not for posterity, but for “today,” and that this music was designed to be accessible to a more representative public than the limited audiences for whom he had composed during the earlier European phase of his career. Second, he wanted very much to participate in the development of a musical-dramatic form that eventually would evolve into “American opera.”

One of the first opportunities Weill had to create a theater piece for American audiences came with Johnny Johnson (1936), a story about a simple soldier in World War I whose hatred of violence and war causes him to find unusual ways to spread the gospel of peace, even on the battlefield. Two years later Knickerbocker Holiday (1938) opened on Broadway; this musical includes “September Song” (one of Weill’s best-known Broadway songs). Following close on the heels of this successful production were others that Weill composed for Broadway, among them Lady in the Dark (1942), with lyrics by Ira Gershwin; Street Scene (1947), with a libretto by Elmer Rice; and Lost in the Stars (1949), based upon Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country.³⁴ Street Scene and Lost in the Stars entered the repertory of the New York City Opera in 1959 and 1958, respectively, the years when that institution was committed to performing American opera.

In 1930, before Weill immigrated to the United States, he attended a production of Elmer Rice’s Street Scene (in a German translation) and was very much taken with the play. Rice had won a Pulitzer Prize for this play in 1929, and in 1931 it was made into a commercially produced film. The drama views a cross-section of life lived in a sordid New York tenement, the very environment in which Rice himself grew up. Love, jealousy, murder—these are the ingredients that fuel the dramatic action, which takes place on a sweltering hot summer day.

Weill met Rice in 1936 during a rehearsal of Johnny Johnson and asked him to collaborate in the writing of an opera based on the play. His request initially met with resistance, but a decade later Rice agreed to the proposal, He, together with Weill and Langston Hughes, the lyricist, refashioned the play for a musical setting. Spoken dialogue links the twenty-one vocal numbers. All of them are exceptionally varied; they range from jazz-influenced material and popular songs to large choral scenes and arias reminiscent of Puccini. The overture dwells upon two recurring motifs: one is a melodic motif associated with a vocal number, “Lonely House,” sung by Sam Kaplan; the other is a rhythmically syncopated instrumental motif. Although the word opera was not used in the publicity for the premiere, several reviews of the opening night event did use that word in the headlines.³⁵ That Weill intended to set a new standard for works produced on Broadway is made clear in a letter addressed to the cast before the initial New York performance. In that letter he noted that Street Scene was “the fulfillment of his dream to have serious dramatic musicals staged on Broadway.”³⁶

Other operas staged during the 1958 and 1959 seasons by the New York City Opera included The Taming of the Shrew (1953) by Vittorio Giannini (1903–66); Tale for a Deaf Ear (1957) by Mark Bucci; and The Triumph of Saint Joan (1959) by Norman Dello Joio (b. 1913).³⁷ As early as the 1930s, Giannini had distinguished himself as a composer of American opera, but interestingly his earliest works in this genre, Lucedia (1934) and The Scarlet Letter (1938), had their premieres in Germany. In the 1960s the Ford Foundation, in an effort to promote American opera, commissioned Giannini to compose a work that would fulfill that purpose. The resulting work was The Harvest (1961), set in the American Southwest at the beginning of the twentieth century. Another of his operas that came to the stage in 1967 was The Servant of Two Masters, a two-act comedy after Goldoni. Of all his operas, none exceeded the popularity of The Taming of the Shrew, a work in which Giannini makes use of leitmotifs to create a sense of musical characterization.

Other more or less successful works by composers in the United States that were produced in the immediate post–World War II decades are The Warrior (1947) and The Veil (1950) by Bernard Rogers (1893–1968); The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County (1950) by Luka Foss (b. 1922); The Mighty Casey (1953), a one-act opera about a baseball player that draws upon a jazz idiom and popular songs, and A Question of Taste (1989) by William Schuman (1910–92); The Ruby (1955) by Dello Joio; The Hero (1965), an opera for television by Mark Bucci (b. 1924);³⁸ The Wife of Martin Guerre (1956) by William Bergsma (b. 1928); The Good Soldier Schweik (1958) by the talented Americanborn Czech composer Robert Kurka (1921–57);³⁹ and The Crucible (1961), a four-act opera by Robert Ward (1917–94).⁴⁰ The last-named opera was drawn from Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible, which had its premiere in 1952. Miller’s play is set in Salem, Massachusetts, at the height of the witch hunts and trials that took place in 1692. Both the play and the opera were intended to be allegorical representations of the McCarthy “witch hunt” of U.S. citizens believed to be card-carrying members of the Communist party, which took place in the 1950s. Ward’s opera incorporates a wide range of conservative compositional styles that reflect the music of Hindemith, Puccini, Protestant hymnody, and Broadway’s popular song repertoire of the 1940s.

The first American woman to have an opera performed in Europe by a major performing company was Louise Talma (1906–96) with The Alcestiad (1962). Her score, in which a twelve-note technique is integrated into her neo-classical style, was also honored with the Waite Award given by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In the 1970s Talma wrote several operas on a smaller scale: Voices of Peace (1973), Have You Heard? Do You Know? (1978), and Diadem (1979). Another opera written by an American woman that had its premiere in the 1970s is Women in the Garden (1978; revised 1984) by Vivian Fine (1913–2000). The libretto is drawn from the life and writings of four women: Virginia Wolff, Gertrude Stein, Isadora Duncan, and Emily Dickinson. Two decades later Fine brought forth a second opera that deals with women’s issues, The Memoirs of Uliana Rooney (1994).⁴¹

OF ALL THE AFRICAN AMERICAN COMPOSERS of the twentieth century, few have gained greater respect than William Grant Still (1895–1978) whose works, especially his symphonies and ballet, have been heard throughout the United States and abroad. Of those that were staged—Troubled Island (1949), Highway No. 1 U.S.A. (1963), A Bayou Legend (1974), and Minette Fontaine (1985)⁴²—one has attracted considerable attention, for it was the first opera by an African American to receive a performance by a major company, in this case the City Center Opera Company of New York. Troubled Island (1949) was set to a libretto by Langston Hughes; he fashioned it from one of his own plays, Drums of Haiti, which was first staged at Detroit in 1930 and later revised as Emperor of Haiti, at Cleveland. The story is set in Haiti and concerns the rise to power, and the eventual overthrow, of Jean Jacques Dessalines. Troubled Island was completed in 1941, but Still’s search for a company to stage the opera took another eight years. Although Still requested that a well-known African American singer be assigned to the leading role, he was also very insistent that the cast be interracial, for he wanted his work to be seen as an American, not an African American, opera. Still did not draw upon Haitian folk material for this opera, but he did engage dancers from Haiti to lend an air of realism to the staging.

When the Metropolitan Opera refused to audition his work, Still asked several of his musician friends to help him find a willing producer. City Center finally agreed, but financial difficulties caused several lengthy delays. To help raise financial support for the City Center production, the Troubled Island Fund was established by, among others, Fiorello LaGuardia, mayor of New York; the president of the fund was none other than Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of the then president of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Although relatively little money was raised by the fund, it called attention to the seriousness with which the public viewed the production of this work. The contract that Still signed with City Center called for three performances, and although the audiences were enthusiastic in their response to the opera, that was the total number given. Perhaps if the production had not been scheduled at the very end of the 1949 season, additional performances might have been arranged. Since that time, Troubled Island has had a number of revivals, including one designed for television in 1981.⁴³

OVER THE COURSE OF SEVERAL DECADES, the American musical has often elevated itself to a stature deemed acceptable by opera companies, as several works discussed above have shown. This growth toward American popular opera was most significant in the 1950s, but examples continued to make themselves known throughout the second half of the century, such as Arthur Loesser’s Most Happy Fella. This musical came to Broadway in 1956, then was staged by Cincinnati Opera before being brought into the repertoire of the New York City Opera in 1991.⁴⁴ Loesser drew his libretto for Most Happy Fella from Sidney Howard’s 1924 Pulitzer Prize–winning drama They Knew What They Wanted, set in California’s wine country. Although Loesser has insisted that Most Happy Fella is “merely a musical with a lotta music,” his score (with orchestrations by Dan Walker) offers the richness of sound that plays well in a large theater, a harmonic language that is bold and dramatically effective, and a structure that is enlivened with almost continuous use of music.

Among composers who were not hesitant to declare the Broadway musical theater idiom to be a wellspring for the creation of American national opera was Leonard Bernstein (1918–1990), internationally famous as a conductor and as the composer of West Side Story (1957). In the year before the production of West Side Story, Bernstein remarked that “the American musical theater has come a long way, borrowing this from opera, that from revue, the other from operetta, something else from vaudeville—and mixing all the elements into something quite new, but something which has been steadily moving in the direction of opera.”⁴⁵ In 1944 Bernstein turned his ballet Fancy Free, which is about three sailors who come ashore to explore the sights and sounds of New York City, into an opera. One of the popular songs from that production is “New York, New York.” From this point forward, Bernstein continued to delve into the everyday drama of the city as source material for future musical productions. Wonderful Town (1953), for example, is set during the Great Depression and reveals the pulse of New York City as Bernstein remembered it.

In 1952 Bernstein produced his first opera, Trouble in Tahiti; thirty years later he composed his second, A Quiet Place, intended as a sequel to Trouble in Tahiti. Bernstein originally planned to have both operas produced as a double bill, using a before-and-after format to show changes in family relationships over a twenty-five-year period, but the juxtaposition of the two operas in a production at Houston did not achieve the kind of emotional and psychological impact he had envisioned. Bernstein withdrew the operas and revised A Quiet Place so that it could totally envelop the earlier opera: Act I is derived solely from A Quiet Place. Act II begins with the first half of Trouble in Tahiti, continues with a brief section from A Quiet Place, and concludes with the remaining sections of Trouble in Tahiti. Act III is from A Quiet Place. The revised opera, entitled A Quiet Place and Trouble in Tahiti, was staged first in Milan (1984), where it was heralded as “the most American of American operas,” and then in Washington, D.C. (1984), where it was reviewed as a possible first step toward the “Great American Opera.”⁴⁶

In his creation of West Side Story, Bernstein composed a score that is structured similarly to his orchestral compositions, with much of the musical material growing out of the melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic cells of the prologue.⁴⁷ The idea for West Side Story came initially from Jerome Robbins, who suggested that Bernstein adapt the plot of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet for an operatic-styled musical in which “drama, singing, and choreographic action would be of equal importance.”⁴⁸ The resulting work, with a libretto by Arthur Laurents and exceptionally well-crafted lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, is a love story that takes place among rival street gangs on New York’s West Side. These gangs have no regard for the older generation or for persons in positions of authority, and their bitter hatred for each other causes the tragic death of one of the lovers. In the end, love triumphs over gang violence and brings a measure of hope to those whose lives have been mired in poverty and despair. With this work, Bernstein introduced Broadway audiences to a new type of musical: it presents a tragedy, with a message that shocked the public, and offers a score that was considered novel and adventuresome for the era in which the initial production took place. West Side Story was quick to gain international attention and in so doing forever altered the stereotypical concept of American musical theater. Here dance serves as a function of the drama, not as a mere decorative diversion, and musical styles vacillate between contemporary jazz (associated with the Jets’ dance numbers) and “south of the border” Latin rhythms (connected with the Sharks, a Puerto Rican gang), between popular song and quasi-operatic arias.

When is a “musical” really an “opera” in disguise? That question has come up repeatedly with several works that have premiered on Broadway, among them Bernstein’s Candide (1956) and Stephen Sondheim’s (b. 1930) Sweeney Todd (1979). Their creators insist their works are musicals, not operas.⁴⁹ To be sure, neither genre is easy to define, for Broadway productions have made their way uptown to the stages of the Metropolitan Opera and the New York City Opera,⁵⁰ and operas, such as Bizet’s Carmen, have reappeared, albeit usually in a different guise, on Broadway.⁵¹ Nevertheless, what the Sondheim and Bernstein scores hold in common are musical-dramatic structures related to the operatic traditions represented by Singspiele and opéras comiques.

The formative years of Sondheim’s career were strongly influenced by Milton Babbitt (1916–2001), with whom he studied musical analysis and composition, and Oscar Hammerstein II, with whom he assisted in the creation of four musicals. Also important was his role as co-lyricist for Bernstein’s West Side Story and as lyricist for Gypsy, with music by Jules Styne. Both productions prepared the way for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962), Sondheim’s first professionally staged musical, for which he wrote both the lyrics and the music. The 1970s saw a number of Sondheim’s works staged on Broadway, including A Little Night Music (1973) and Sweeney Todd.

The genesis for Sondheim’s version of Sweeney Todd came principally from two sources: the movie Hangover Square (1945), with a film score by Bernard Herrmann (1911–75), and Christopher Bond’s Sweeney Todd, a play derived from the original Sweeney Todd play of 1842 by George Dibdin. In both the Dibdin and Bond plays, language is used to differentiate the social strata of the characters: the speeches of Todd, the judge, and the two young lovers are in iambic meter; the dialogue for the other characters is written in blank verse. This same distinction between “colloquial prose and blank verse” is retained in Sondheim’s melodramatic rendering of the Sweeney Todd story, in which music accompanies nearly three-fourths of the total production.⁵² His score is very complex; it abounds with a wide variety of songs (ballads, burlesques, patter, and parlor songs) and relies upon recurring motifs, many of them related to the church and ballroom music, to support the overall structure. In this, Sondheim’s music shows influences from the works of Britten, Vaughan Williams, Stravinsky, and especially Wagner.

THE ULTRACONSERVATIVE STYLE in American opera was represented at mid-century by Vanessa, a large-scale, four-act work that had its premiere at the Metropolitan Opera in 1958 and for which the composer, Samuel Barber (1910–81), was awarded a Pulitzer Prize.⁵³ The opera, with a libretto by Gian Carlo Menotti, is set in an unspecified northern European country at the beginning of the twentieth century. Vanessa has been waiting twenty years for her lover to return to her, but instead of her lover appearing it is Anatol, the son of her lover, who arrives and confirms that his father is dead. Vanessa and her niece, Erika, are attracted to Anatol. Erika and Anatol have an affair and she becomes pregnant. Vanessa, unaware of Erika’s condition, falls in love with Anatol and they go off together to Paris. Erika is left at home to await the arrival of someone who will become her true love. Notable numbers in this opera include Erika’s ballad “Must the Winter Come So Soon,” Vanessa’s aria “Do Not Utter a Word,” and the canonic quintet of Act IV, “To Leave, to Break, to Find, to Keep.” The orchestra plays a powerful and cinematic role in this opera. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the scene in which Erika refuses Anatol’s offer of marriage. Against her repeated rejections of his offer, the orchestra overpowers her protestations with thematic motifs that foretell the outcome of the opera.

Vanessa was so well suited for the stage and contained so many excellent musical numbers that it was not unreasonable for the public to expect Barber’s next major opera, commissioned for the gala opening of the Metropolitan Opera’s new home at Lincoln Center, to be just as theatrically and musically effective. Unfortunately, the inaugural production of Antony and Cleopatra (1966) did not satisfy the public’s expectations and the opera was withdrawn. It was later revised and presented by the Juilliard School of Music in 1973, but the revision did little to change the public’s evaluation of the work.

In Barber’s chamber opera A Hand of Bridge four singers give the appearance of concentrating on the playing of the game, yet all the while they are letting their minds drift off to thoughts of their secret escapades—all of which are revealed as asides to the audience throughout the opera. The harmonic underpinning of the accompaniment vacillates between E minor and E major, with the E minor seemingly reserved for those passages in which a character alludes to his or her marital indiscretions.

More varied and adventurous, though still not involving any radical break with tradition, has been the work of Samuel Barber’s close friend and colleague Gian Carlo Menotti (b. 1911), a theater composer of the order of Puccini and the verismo school. Menotti’s musical style is eclectic, drawing upon heterogeneous elements with a single eye to dramatic effect, of which he is an unerring master. He writes his own librettos, and he often serves as director for his musical productions. Conspicuous among his many successful works for the stage are The Medium (1946), an unashamed melodrama perfectly matched by equally melodramatic music; a short comic opera The Telephone (1947); and his first full-length opera, The Consul (1950), a compelling treatment of the tragedy of homeless persons in an indifferent world.⁵⁴ Amahl and the Night Visitors, originally produced on television in 1951, has become a popular classic, performed annually during the Christmas holiday season.

It is not necessary to make extravagant claims for Menotti’s musical originality in order to recognize that he was one of the very few serious opera composers on the American scene in the 1950s who thoroughly understood the requirements of the theater and made a consistent, sincere attempt to reach the large opera-loving public; his success is a testimonial to the continuing validity of a long and respectable operatic tradition. Critics of Menotti contend that he reached a peak of creativity with The Saint of Bleecker Street (1954) and that his subsequent works for the theater—Help! Help! The Globolinks! (1969), The Most Important Man (1971), Tamu-Tamu (1973), and The Hero (1976)—provided only a faint reminder of the mastery he had achieved in earlier years. Menotti, undaunted by adverse criticism, has continued composing new operas. Some of his more recent creations include Goya (1986) and The Wedding (1988), a comic opera that had its premiere in Seoul, Korea.

The Saint of Bleecker Street is set in New York’s Little Italy and focuses on the conflict between Annina, a religious mystic who wants to become a nun, and her brother, Michele, who has absolutely no regard for religion and curses her decision to take her vows. Annina is a very sickly person, but she is sought after by those in the Italian community who believe her supreme faith can work miracles. Michele is a hot-tempered person who, in a fit of jealous rage, kills his mistress and then is forced to live the life of a fugitive to escape imprisonment. Michele’s hardness of heart toward his sister continues to the very end of the opera, for even as death overtakes her sickly body, Michele cannot come to terms with her religious beliefs. Menotti’s setting of the opera includes considerably more choral writing than is found in most of his other opera scores.

Stravinsky, along with many other émigré composers, sought refuge in the United States at the onset of World War II.⁵⁵ His interest in setting an opera to an English-language text was expressed soon after his arrival, especially after he became acquainted with the phenomenal success Menotti had achieved in the 1940s with the Broadway productions of The Telephone and The Medium. He, however, did not find a suitable subject to bring to the operatic stage until 1947, when he visited an exhibition in Chicago. There he saw William Hogarth’s pictures entitled The Rake’s Progress, painted in the 1730s. This series of eight pictures portrays a moral fable that is a variant of the Faust legend: a young man sells his soul to the Devil in exchange for the granting of several wishes. The Rake’s Progress (Venice, 1951) is the only full-length opera that Stravinsky composed.⁵⁶ The libretto was fashioned by W. H. Auden, whom Stravinsky had chosen because of “his special gift for versification,”⁵⁷ and by Chester Kallman, whom Auden invited to work on the project. This opera, like everything else of Stravinsky’s, has been so much written about that little need be said here. It is the most thorough example in modern times of a return to classical opera. Not only does it consist of separate solo (or ensemble) vocal numbers, accompanied by a small chamber orchestra; its whole texture, and the harmonic and melodic idiom of the music itself, are neo-Mozartean. A harpsichord accompanies the simple recitatives and is also used to dramatically portray the ghostly atmosphere of the graveyard scene, in which it accompanies the playing of the fatal card game. There is a closing “moral” epilogue, as in Don Giovanni; and the mingled tone of spoofing and sentiment throughout is reminiscent of Figaro or Così fan tutte.

Part of the charm of The Rake’s Progress comes from our being kept constantly aware that its eighteenth-century costume is a disguise that only half conceals the sophisticated complexity of the drama and music—a mask that can be enjoyed for its own inanimate beauty but that at the same time shields the oversensitive spectators from direct contact with the emotions of laughter and pity, thereby allowing them to enjoy those emotions behind an unmoving mask of their own. But the disguise is forgotten when we come to the dialogue between Tom Rakewell and Nick Shadow in the graveyard scene of Act III,⁵⁸ and the pathetic closing scenes in Bedlam, including Anne’s tender farewell lullaby (example 29.1).

Stravinsky wanted the premiere of this opera to take place in a small theater and, since the text is in English, would have been happy to have it occur in either the United States or England, but no reasonable offers for performances were forthcoming. He had not received a commission to compose The Rake’s Progress and therefore had to find a venue that would provide the requisite financial backing. Eventually the solution came from the Italian government: Stravinsky was offered a substantial fee for the rights to present The Rake’s Progress as the featured attraction and inaugural event of the fourteenth Biennale di Venezia, an international festival of contemporary music. The opera was staged at the Teatro La Fenice.

ROGER SESSIONS (1896–1985) and Hugo Weisgall (1912–97) offer another aspect of American opera, although their works have yet to be fully appreciated by the public. Sessions composed two operas, The Trial of Lucullus (1947) and Montezuma, the latter a monumental atonal score performed first in Berlin (1964) and then in Boston (1976) under the direction of Sarah Caldwell. These avant-garde creations did little to influence a younger generation of composers. What did influence them was Sessions’s teaching and his high regard for the rich heritage of Western music.

This influence can be felt in the music of Weisgall (who studied with Sessions), for several of his operas show an allegiance to the grand operatic tradition, while at the same time exploring new literary and musical territory. Weisgall’s earliest operas are The Tenor (1948–50) and The Stronger (1952); both are in one act and draw upon plays by Wedekind and Strindberg, respectively. In them Weisgall shows his ability to transform powerful psychological dramas into musical works for the stage. His first full-length opera came with Six Characters in Search of an Author (1959), after a 1921 play of the same title by Pirandello. At the beginning of the play, actors are rehearsing a new play by none other than Pirandello, when into their theatrical space come six strangers—characters from a play left unfinished by their creator—searching for a playwright who will complete the drama. This “play within a play” idea is retained by Weisgall and his librettist Denis Johnston; only now the situation involves an “opera within an opera,” with the singers rehearsing The Temptation of St. Anthony by Weisgall. The singers are not enthusiastic about performing The Temptation, nor is the director, who confesses that he really “hates this modern, tuneless stuff, but … now and again we must present them for reasons of prestige.” A further mocking of Weisgall’s style occurs during the rehearsal of an expressionist aria about St. Anthony’s pig; the accompanist calls the singer’s attention to some wrong notes, adding that the piece is “lousy enough with the right notes.” With the arrival of the six strangers, characters from an incomplete opera, Weisgall is given the opportunity to juxtapose different musical styles, ranging from opera buffa to verismo. The harmonic language of this score is unquestionably atonal, yet it has moments of lyric beauty, as in the soliloquy sung by the stepdaughter at her audition.⁵⁹ There is little of the plot that is easily comprehended by the audience or, for that matter, by the characters on stage, as one of them confesses: “This certainly sounds like a real opera. Nobody knows what is going on.” What Weisgall’s score makes fully comprehensible, however, is the urgency of the strangers’ search for an author.

EXAMPLE 29.1 The Rake’s Progress, Act III, scene iii

The Rake’s Progress—Stravinsky. © 1954 by Boosey & Hawkes, Inc. Reprinted by permission.

Two other full-length operas by Weisgall include Nine Rivers from Jordan (1968) and Jenny or The Hundred Nights (1976), the latter on a Japanese no drama. They are presented in a very dissonant and rhythmically alive medium and represent well the distinguishing characteristics of Weisgall’s style: florid soaring vocal lines (example 29.2); quotations of familiar tunes (such as “Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms,” which appears in a violin descant in The Hundred Nights); and excellent ensemble writing.

Weisgall was born in Bohemia, and although he immigrated as a child to America, traces of his Central European background seem ever present in his music, especially in those scores where the atonal and chromatic elements of his harmonic language are infused with expressionism. Evidence of this can be heard in his early works as well as in two works he brought to the stage in the 1990s: The Garden of Adonis, a score Weisgall had worked on over the course of thirty-two years, and Esther, commissioned by San Francisco Opera but first performed by New York City Opera.

EXAMPLE 29.2 Six Characters in Search of an Author

Six Characters in Search of an Author—Weisgall. © 1960 Merion Music Inc. Used by permission.

Throughout his career, Weisgall was a strong advocate of chamber operas, composing them and organizing groups to specialize in their production. One of his last contributions to this repertoire was The Garden of Adonis, the vocal score of which was begun in 1960 but not finished until 1981. The orchestration was completed in 1991, and the following year Adonis had its premiere in Omaha. This production, however, was soon to be overshadowed by the highly acclaimed New York premiere of Esther in 1993. Charles Kondek’s well-crafted libretto is fashioned from the biblical story that relates the extraordinary efforts of one woman to release Israel from its bondage to Persia, a story commemorated in the Jewish holiday of Purim.⁶⁰ Esther is in three acts of thirty-six scenes and is of “grand opera” proportions. The Schoenberg-style serialism of previous Weisgall operas is also present, a style well suited to the portrayal of this gripping drama. In the words of the composer, the score for Esther is “chromatic but also highly Romantic. Very cinematographic too.”⁶¹ In the matter of structure, Weisgall is conventional in that he continues to use set pieces (arias, duets, and ensembles) throughout the three acts. Conventional, too, is Weisgall’s attention to the human voice. Major roles for soprano, mezzo-soprano, contralto, countertenor, tenor, baritone, and bass-baritone are supported by a large orchestra, a chorus, and a children’s chorus. Each character’s personality is fully developed in the course of the opera, but none more so than Esther’s, whose growth from a shy teenager into a courageous spokesperson for her people allows her to emerge as one of the great heroines of opera. Reviews of this opera held one thing in common: Esther offers a powerful evening of musical theater and constitutes one of the major American operas of the twentieth century.⁶²

JACK BEESON (B. 1921), a pupil of Douglas Moore, has composed nine operas. Of these, his best known is Lizzie Borden (1965), which has been presented multiple times on stage and television.⁶³ The Lizzie Borden libretto is based on an incident that occurred in Falls River, Massachusetts, in 1892. The essence of the drama is contained in a rhyme, tauntingly chanted by children (offstage) in the closing scene of the opera:

Lizzie Borden took an ax
And gave her mother forty whacks
When she saw what she had done
She gave her father forty-one.

Indeed, someone did take an ax and murder Lizzie’s stepmother and her father, a wealthy banker in Falls River. The case went to trial and Lizzie was acquitted of the murders. The community members, however, passed their own judgment on the crime, forcing Lizzie to spend the rest of her life shuttered in her father’s house, living off her inheritance. Other characters in the opera include a clergyman and Lizzie’s sister, Margret, who elopes with Captain Jason in Act III.

Beeson’s score appeared in the era of the 1960s when a widening gulf was developing between the self-described modernists, in whose scores serialism played a major role, and the conservatives (or as some prefer to call them, the traditionalists), in whose scores tonality continued to play an important role. The considerable dissonance that pervades Lizzie Borden fittingly expresses the horrors of this gripping drama, but several reviewers of the premiere misinterpreted the harmonically strident music as a reflection of Beeson’s adoption of a twelve-tone procedure. Nothing could be further from the truth, for the composer has consistently defined himself as a conservative. Lizzie Borden is tonally anchored, has set pieces (arias), and occasionally relieves the overall expressionism, in which the score is enveloped, with music related to the Victorian era, such as hymn-like tunes and parlor songs. Gospel hymns and flapper dances are also to be found in another of his operas The Sweet Bye and Bye (1957). In addition to full-length operas, Beeson has composed several chamber operas. They include Hello Out There (1954), based on a one-act play by William Saroyan; Cyrano (1994); and Sorry, Wrong Number (1999), an opera in one act based on a 1944 radio play of the same title.

Scene from Lizzie Borden by Jack Beeson, with Phyllis Pancella in the title role in the 1996 Glimmerglass Opera production.

(PHOTO, © 1996 GEORGE MOTT. COURTESY OF GLIMMERGLASS OPERA, COOPERSTOWN, N.Y.)

Beeson gained valuable operatic experience at the Columbia University Opera Workshop, where he served variously as rehearsal accompanist, vocal coach, and assistant conductor. The significance of his association with this group is to be measured by the fact that this workshop was in the forefront of staging the premieres of a number of American operas and performing European works that were deemed too avant-garde for consideration by established opera companies.

New York City, of course, was not the only place where there was notable operatic activity. All around the country opera companies performing in newly constructed theaters were contributing significantly to the rise of American opera. Among some of the more important venues for productions were, and continue to be, those in Chicago, Santa Fe, and Houston, with the last named being the site where a number of operatic works of Carlisle Floyd (discussed below) have been brought to the stage.

Santa Fe was where The Tower (1957), the first of Marvin David Levy’s (b. 1932) three one-act operas, had a successful premiere. The other two, Sotoba Komachi (1957) and Escorial (1958), were staged in New York. Their success brought Levy a commission from the Metropolitan Opera, which he fulfilled in 1967 with Mourning Becomes Elektra. This three-act opera is based on a trilogy of plays by Eugene O’Neill—Homecoming; The Haunted; and The Hunted⁶⁴—and is set in the 1860s in a New England seacoast town. As originally written, Levy’s score would have been a six-hour production, but the work was greatly reduced for the actual staging. Levy received a second commission from the Metropolitan Opera and composed The Balcony, but a performance never took place.⁶⁵ Years later, he revisited the score and fashioned it into a musical for Broadway as The Grand Balcony (1989). The accessible style that characterizes Levy’s operatic music is achieved, in part, by the singable material that graces his scores. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Levy does not emphasize angular vocal lines nor does he explore the extremes of the vocal ranges. He does, however, rely upon an occasional use of bitonality and a recurrence of leitmotifs to sharpen the dramatic tension of the musical structure.

Of the many composers who have shared Weisgall’s interest in writing chamber operas is Stephen Paulus (b. 1949), whose masterpiece in this category is The Village Singer (1979).⁶⁶ This comic one-act opera, set at the turn of the century in New England, is based on a short story written in 1891 about an older woman who was asked to retire from the church choir. She was not about to take this action lightly and decided to compete vigorously with her replacement in the choir loft by singing loudly from her house located next to the church. The success of The Village Singer paved the way for the acceptance of Paulus’s first full-length opera, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1982), drawn from a novel by John Cain. This tragedy concerns ordinary folks living in a small town who become hopelessly involved in a traumatic situation. A year after its premiere, The Postman became the first American opera to be staged at the Edinburgh International Festival. These first two operas were commissioned by the St Louis’s Opera Theater, as were two of his later operas, The Woodlanders (1985) and Woman at the Otowi Crossing (1995).

OVER THE COURSE of the last half century, Carlisle Floyd (b. 1926) has emerged as one of the major contributors to the repertoire of American opera, his dozen or more works bringing to the stage important themes of Americana that are centered on ordinary people caught up in realistic hometown situations. Floyd first gained recognition as an opera composer with Susannah (1955), an immediately popular work that continues to hold the stage. Susannah was first performed at Florida State University, where Floyd was a member of the faculty. A year later New York City Opera staged the opera, followed by that same company’s performance of the work at the Brussels Exhibition in 1958, an event that brought Floyd immediate international recognition. Susannah is based on the apocryphal biblical account of Susannah and the elders, in which the prophet Daniel clears Susannah’s name and reputation by proving the elders had lied. Floyd’s retelling of the story produces a genuine folk opera: the setting is in a rural town in the southern United States, where the revivalist preacher and his congregation assume the roles of Daniel and the elders.⁶⁷ Traditional revival hymns, square dance music, and even some ballads from Appalachia provide local color for the score. Especially memorable is Susannah’s “The trees on the mountain are cold and bare,” a folk-like song in Act II, scene iii, that is accompanied first by solo harp and then by strings. Woven into the fabric of the score are passages that are spoken, rather than sung, and these are often assigned to the minister. Certain themes or tunes are repeated in the course of the opera, lending a sense of continuity to the whole. For example, several repetitions of the “jaybird song” occur, each time sung by Sam to his sister, recalling memories of their childhood days.

The story revolves around a church congregation wrongly accusing Susannah of not being a virgin, but when the minister comes calling on her and seduces her, he discovers for himself that those accusations are false. After Susannah confides to her brother, Sam, what has taken place in his absence, he vows to kill the minister. His actions, however, provoke the congregation to once again point an accusing finger at Susannah, claiming she goaded him into the murderous act. They also threaten to drive her out of the valley. She, however, holds them at bay, brandishing a rifle to underscore her refusal to leave and as the curtain falls, the audience is left with the knowledge that Susannah has been betrayed by the very people she should have been able to trust. As one writer has pointed out, hypocrisy destroys lives while at the same time it dooms any survivors to a fate worse than death.⁶⁸

Some of Floyd’s other operas that have gained national attention are Wuthering Heights (1958);⁶⁹ Of Mice and Men (1970), adapted by Floyd from John Steinbeck’s play rather than from his 1937 novel; Bilby’s Doll (1976), after Esther Forbes’s novel A Mirror for Witches; Willie Stark (1981), after Robert Penn Warren’s 1946 novel All the King’s Men; and Cold Sassy Tree (2000), after Olive Ann Burns’s 1984 novel of the same title. Of Mice and Men chronicles the adventures of two migrant workers who dream of owning their own small ranch. George, and his slow-witted sidekick, Lennie, are continually in difficulty with either the law or their employers, primarily because Lennie cannot stay out of trouble: his fatal urge to caress and cuddle soft living things eventually causes him to accidentally murder his employer’s wife. For his actions, Lennie faces arrest, imprisonment, and most assuredly a death sentence. George cannot bear the thought of Lennie being hurt or scared by the authorities, and he decides to end Lennie’s life in a more humane fashion, reasoning that if he has to die, he might as well die happy. Of Mice and Men is fashioned in a traditional style, with arias, ensembles, and other set pieces. The text plays a dominant role, as it does in many of Floyd’s other works for the stage; his instrumental music accommodates the text with its rhythmic flexibility and light orchestral textures. Of the twelve roles in the opera, only one, Curley’s wife, is for a female.

Willie Stark is a politically charged story that takes place in the depression era and centers on the rise and fall of a southern demagogue. Elements from opera and Broadway-style theater are mixed together here to create a rather strident score that once again makes the projection of the text of paramount importance. Floyd uses various devices to accomplish this, from spoken dialogue and a quasi-Sprechstimme style of recitative to arioso passages in which the orchestral accompaniment is kept very much in the background. Only when the dramatic action reaches an emotional climax does Floyd allow his characters to express themselves in song, as in Willie’s memorable monologue at the end of Act I and Anne Stanton’s intensely emotional episode in Act II.

Scene from Of Mice and Men by Carlisle Floyd, with Ron Nelman as George and Anthony Dean Griffey as Lennie in the 1997 Glimmerglass Opera production.

(PHOTO, © 1997 GEORGE MOTT. COURTESY OF GLIMMERGLASS OPERA, COOPERSTOWN, N.Y.)

Willie Stark stands in sharp contrast to Cold Sassy Tree, Floyd’s first attempt to write a comic opera. The premiere was with Houston Grand Opera in the spring of 2000. Cold Sassy Tree, set in rural Georgia, is basically a love story of an older man (Lattimore) who, within three weeks of his wife’s death, marries a woman half his age (Simpson). This affair causes a scandal in the town, but Lattimore defends his actions, claiming he needed help keeping his house and found it would be cheaper to marry a woman than to hire one. The marriage, however, turns out to be more than one of convenience, for in the final scene, it is learned that Simpson is pregnant, a fact she unfortunately is unable to share with Lattimore before he is fatally wounded in a robbery at his store.

Among operatic works by Floyd that do not have a southern setting is Wuthering Heights (1959).⁷⁰ Another is Citizen of Paradise (1983), a monodrama for mezzosoprano on the life of Emily Dickinson⁷¹; the libretto is drawn from a selection of Dickinson’s poems, which Floyd skillfully arranged as a prologue, four episodes (“Self,” “Friendship and Society,” “Nature,” “Death and Solitude”), and an epilogue to create a dramatically intense and musically effective chamber piece for the theater. The sole accompaniment is provided by a pianist, onstage, seated off to one side of the drawing room where Emily reads her poetry. A decade earlier Floyd had created the monodrama Flower and Hawk (1972), the scoring for which is distinguished from other Floyd operas by its use of an expanded percussion group. Since neither monodrama requires staging, they have often been accorded successful concert performances.

Lee Hoiby (b. 1926) began his highly successful career as an opera composer with the 1958 production at New York City Opera of The Scarf, a work in one act with a libretto drawn from Chekhov’s novel The Witch. Librettos for many of his subsequent operas are also drawn from well-known literary sources: Beatrice (1959), after Maeterlinck’s Soeur Béatrice; Natalia Petrovna (1964; revised as A Month in the Country, 1981), after Turgenev’s A Month in the Country; Summer and Smoke (1971), after Tennessee Williams’s play of the same title; and The Tempest (1986), after Shakespeare’s play. In addition to these works, Hoiby has written a children’s opera and two humorous monologues—The Italian Lesson (1985) and Bon Appetit! (1986). The latter was designed to be a companion piece to the former and is based on a chocolate cake recipe by Julia Child.

Hoiby’s operas are written, for the most part, in a post-Romantic, tonal idiom—an admittedly conservative style—strongly influenced by Barber, Debussy, and Menotti. Exemplary of his “innate sense of melody” is The Tempest, an opera that abounds in lyrical lines.⁷² Especially memorable is the aria “Be not afeared,” sung by Caliban in Act II; for the finale, Hoiby has written a finely wrought passacaglia for the entire cast. Also of interest is the richly orchestrated score, which requires a fairly large group of musicians. Although The Tempest was highly acclaimed by the audiences who attended the premiere in Des Moines, Iowa (the work having been commissioned by the Des Moines Metro Opera), a local critic found fault with Hoiby for “his seemingly blissful refusal to acknowledge the very existence of musical modernism”⁷³ Early in his career, Hoiby was rebuffed a number of times for his conservative style, but over the years he has never felt the need to alter his compositional palette for the sake of inclusion.

Another composer who continues along the path established by Moore and Floyd is Dominick Argento (b. 1927). As a way to avoid the type of contentious criticism that was leveled at Hoiby by “the modernists,” Argento purposely positioned himself in a geographic location (the University of Minnesota) that was removed from the mainstream of academic composers. By so doing, he gained the freedom to develop his own ideas of operatic composition and came forth with a great variety of works. His style explores twelve-note technique within a tonal context and exhibits influences from Weisgall, Hanson, and Hovhaness. Argento composed six operas before gaining national recognition with Postcard from Morocco (1971), a lyrical work, moderate in length, performed without intermission, with an ensemble of only eight instrumentalists.⁷⁴ The libretto by John Donahue presents a series of dreams involving seven characters, strangers to each other, who are gathered together in a North African train station. Each person is carrying some luggage, the contents of which he or she purposely tries, without success, to shield from the other passengers. For example, a somber, but dignified lady reluctantly reveals that she keeps her lover in her luggage. Not until Mr. Owens (the only character who has been given a name) confesses that his luggage is empty do the group of seven disperse, with six characters boarding the train and Mr. Owens embarking on a voyage of self-discovery in a ship. In the course of the long wait at the train station, the seven characters are entertained by a puppet show using life-size puppets, and it is these puppets who have built the ship in which Mr. Owens takes his leave. Argento’s music is tonal, often tuneful, recalling upon occasion the music of Britten. It also reveals the layering of different styles, some borrowed or paraphrased, with new material of his own creation, a technique that can be observed in his later operas as well.

Argento’s The Voyage of Edgar Allan Poe (1976) is a full-length opera that depicts Poe in the final days of his life, when he had become an outcast from society and suffered mentally and financially to the point of going half mad. The score reveals a free application of the twelve-note technique and contains some very lyrical passages. Effective use of the choruses, both onstage and offstage, the memorable harp interlude, and the setting of Poe’s poem “Annabel Lee” to a simply shaped melody, sung unaccompanied by Virginia on her deathbed, are several of the notable features of this well-designed opera. Other works by Argento for the stage that have met with varying degrees of success are The Water Bird (1977), a monodrama after Chekhov and Audubon; Miss Havisham’s Wedding Night (1981), inspired by Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations; The Aspern Papers (1988), an opera about an opera and the people who create it, after a novella by Henry James; Casanova’s Homecoming (revised, 1985), a full-blown opera buffa based on episodes from Jacques Casanova’s L’Histoire de ma vie; and The Dream of Valentino (1994), a multimedia production about the life of Rudolph Valentino.

Casanova’s Homecoming, with a libretto by Argento, is set in Venice during the 1774 Carnival season, when Casanova returns home after an absence of eighteen years. He immediately becomes embroiled in a scheme to procure a dowry for the daughter of his former gambling partner. Meanwhile, the Marquis de Lisle has a scheme of his own, namely, to discredit the reputation of Casanova by getting him involved with Bellino, a person he believes to be a castrato. Bellino does indeed sing castrato roles, impersonating women in various Venetian opera productions, but “he” is “himself” an impersonation: a woman named Teresa has passed herself off as a castrato in order to earn money to support her children. Casanova also becomes involved with the very wealthy, but half crazy, elderly Madame D’Urfé. Act I, scene ii is set in an opera house, and it is here that Argento quotes from Jommelli’s 1770s version of Demofoonte, albeit overlaid with his own music, to lend a touch of realism to the comedy.

Thea Musgrave, who emigrated from Scotland and has resided in the United States since the late 1970s, uses serial techniques to shape the atonal language of her operas, from The Decision (1967), a three-act tragedy about a mine disaster in Scotland, to Harriet, the Woman Called Moses (1985), based on the life of Harriet Tubman, who helped slaves escape to northern states via the Underground Railroad.⁷⁵ The most melodic of Musgrave’s operas to date is A Christmas Carol (1979), which includes quotations from recognizable tunes, such as that associated with the carol “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen.” The most dramatic is her third full-length opera, Mary, Queen of Scots (1977), commissioned by the Scottish Opera and given its premiere at the Edinburgh Festival.

The libretto for Mary, written by the composer after an unpublished play by Amalia Elguera, adheres closely to historical fact and is a vivid portrayal of sixteenth-century events surrounding the life of Mary Stuart, widow of the king of France, who returns to Scotland and briefly lays claim to the throne. The opera revolves around Mary (soprano) and three ambitious men whose desire to rule Scotland causes them to view the queen as a viable route to power. To these three male vocal roles are added several more for lesser characters. The chorus also plays a dominant role in the crowd scenes. A suite of sixteenth-century dances and a lute song sung by Essex provide the “period” atmosphere against which Musgrave develops her own musical style. After Mary’s arrival in Scotland, she is wooed by Bothwell, Moray, and Darnley (“The three stars of my firmament / Which, which should I follow?”); her decision to wed Darnley unleashes a series of melodramatic events, not the least of them the Protestant Scots demanding that the Catholic queen abdicate. The opera concludes with a telescoping of several of these events: Moray’s taking the reins of power; Mary departing from Scotland, leaving behind her kingdom and her infant son; and finally, the assassination of Moray. Musgrave’s skillful handling of text and music produces a riveting experience for opera audiences, especially for those who attended performances in Scotland in an era when independence was on the minds of those in the audiences as well as for those in Norfolk, who were reminded that the nearby city of Jamestown was named for Mary’s son, James, the future king of Scotland and England.

Shining Brow (1993) is Daron Hagen’s (b. 1961) contribution to the list of twentieth-century operas that treat an important aspect of American culture.⁷⁶ Set in the early years of the century in Wisconsin, the story chronicles an important series of events from 1903 to 1914 in the life of Frank Lloyd Wright. In particular, the opera treats Wright’s falling out with his mentor, Louis Sullivan; his love affair with Mamah Cheney (the wife of one of his clients) and his prolonged sojourn with her in Europe; and the tragedy he experienced when Mamah and his children were murdered by a crazed servant, who also destroyed Taliesin by setting fire to the buildings.⁷⁷ A series of verbal motifs are repeated throughout the opera, but these motifs are not always vocalized by the same characters. It is through the repetition of these verbal motifs that their efficacy is achieved. The various scenes in the opera are bridged by a series of interludes, each uniquely different. They vary from a brass choir interlude to a barbershop quartet of newspaper reporters whose lyrics concern events that occurred shortly before the start of World War I.

Another composer committed to the Americanization of opera is William Bolcom (b. 1938). His musical palette shows influences from three important sources: the music of Charles Ives; his long standing involvement with the revival of ragtime in the 1960s and 1970s; and two of his mentors, Milhaud and Messiaen. His first works for the theater—Dynamite Tonite (1963), Greatshot (1969), and Casino Paradise (1990), all of which were done in collaboration with Arnold Weinstein as librettist—are so-called cabaret operas, in which jazz, rock, and popular music are interwoven with either atonal writing (as in Dynamite Tonite) or with tonal and melodic materials reminiscent of Ives and Copland. Only in 1992 did Bolcom come forth with a more traditionally styled opera, which was commissioned by Lyric Opera of Chicago, the first time an American composer received a commission from this company. The resulting work was McTeague, based on an 1899 novel by Frank Norris and set in San Francisco at the turn of the century The story concerns a dentist and his unlicensed practice, his wife who wins a considerable amount of gold in a lottery, and her former lover who is jealous of her winnings. Murder and greed are the hallmarks of this highly dramatic opera. Bolcom’s score bridges the divide between classical and popular music by having tonal and atonal styles juxtaposed with Broadway, country, and cabaret styles. Fashioned in a similar traditional mold was Bolcom’s next opera, A View from the Bridge (1999), which also had its premiere in Chicago. The libretto, drawn from Arthur Miller’s play of the same title and written by Arthur Miller and Arnold Weinstein, concerns the lives of illegal Italian immigrants who work the docks of New York’s harbor as longshoremen.

Thomas Pasatieri (b. 1945) has composed operas in many different categories, all in an accessible style with lyrical melodic lines that reflect an affinity with the vocal styles of Strauss and Puccini. Some of his best-known works were produced in the 1970s. Among them are La divinia (1966), a one-act comedy about the last performance of an aging coloratura soprano; The Seagull (1974), based on Chekhov’s play; Signor Deluso (one-act version, 1974; three-act version, 1975), after Molière; and Calvary (1971), a religious music drama based on a text by William Butler Yeats.

Lee Goldstein (1952–90) created only two operas, but his highly successful comedy The Fan has continued to attract considerable attention since its premiere in 1989 by Lyric Opera of Chicago. Carlo Goldoni’s Il ventaglio—a play in which the repair of a fan causes all sorts of problems that are sparked by jealous suspicions—was the source from which Charles Kondek drew his libretto. Goldstein’s score calls for a soprano, a mezzo-soprano, and three tenors.

Conrad Susa (b. 1935) has, to date, composed four operas: Transformations (1973), Black River: a Wisconsin Idyll (1975; revised 1981), The Love of Don Perlimplin (1984), and The Dangerous Liaisons (1994). The libretto for his first opera, subtitled “an entertainment,” was fashioned from the introduction and nine tales of Anne Sexton’s Transformations, which in turn was based on sixteen tales by the brothers Grimm. The tales selected include Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Sleeping Beauty, Hansel and Gretel, and Rumpelstiltskin. The opera is organized in two parts of five scenes each. The scoring is for nine instrumentalists and eight singers, with each singer assuming more than one role in the course of the opera. A narrator, who is intended to personify Anne Sexton, “interprets and transforms” the tales. Incorporated into the musical style are popular songs and dances originating in the 1940s and 1950s. Black River, based on Michael Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip, is written in a “grand opera” style. It makes use of cinematic techniques to create a dreamscape within which are portrayed the lives of three women who once inhabited the rural countryside of nineteenth-century Wisconsin.

Susa’s third opera is drawn from Federico García Lorca’s play Amor de Don Perlimplin con Belisa en su jardin, a work that was originally designed to have music (songs and instrumental interludes) included with its performances. Several composers had already set García Lorca’s text to music before Susa offered his version of the play;⁷⁸ among them was Vittorio Rieti (1898–1994) whose three-act Don Perlimplin had its premiere in Paris in 1952.⁷⁹ The story is set in Spain and concerns a rich older man (bass) who marries a much younger Belisa (soprano). To keep his young bride happy, he invents a young lover whose identity Belisa is not permitted to discover—a lover who showers Belisa with tokens of love, sending her flowers and poetry. Perlimplin cannot bring himself to confess his deception and, rather than tell Belisa the truth, he decides to commit suicide. Susa’s musical setting of the García Lorca play is in an accessible tonal style, replete with Spanish dance rhythms and effective orchestral scoring.

In 1994 Susa fulfilled a commission from the San Francisco Opera with the production of The Dangerous Liaisons. The source for Philip Littell’s libretto is a late eighteenth-century novel of the same title (Les Liaisons dangereuses) that tells the story of the unscrupulous Valmont, who delights in seducing women from all walks of life. Although his amorous conquests, aided by the Marquise de Merteuil, bring him pleasure and his victims much sorrow, Valmont eventually pays the ultimate price for his escapades: he loses his life in a duel.

TWENTIETH-CENTURY OPERA has certainly not lacked composers willing to experiment with different concepts of musical and dramatic forms, but seldom have any achieved the kind of box office success that Philip Glass (b. 1937) has done with his major operas.⁸⁰ The 1976 production at the Metropolitan Opera of Einstein on the Beach, created by Glass in collaboration with the playwright-director-media artist Robert Wilson, initiated a new movement in modern opera that favors an eclectic style embracing classical, popular, and non-Western traditions.⁸¹ Here Glass’s compositional format depends on maximal repetitions of minimal musical segments tempered with Romantic emotionalism. In other words, this minimalist style, as it is sometimes called, involves the continuous repetition of melodic cells while at the same time subjecting these cells to alteration through barely perceptible changes in texture, harmony, and especially rhythm. Unfortunately, the terms “minimalist” and “maximalist,” when applied to Glass’s manner of composing, are far too restrictive to define a style of opera that is closely tied to the visual arts of stage design and governed by the textual sounds derived from his use of archaic languages. Nor do these terms adequately describe a style of composing that seems to be in a constant state of development, for each of Glass’s operas marks a different plateau in his career.

The idea for Einstein on the Beach came not from a literary source but from drawings created by Robert Wilson. Glass wrote music to accompany the drawings and out of this collaborative project evolved a work that provides a unique theatrical experience. Einstein on the Beach is an allegory of the atomic age communicated to an audience through a stream-of-consciousness technique held together by the biographical events of the scientist’s life. For more than four uninterrupted hours (there are no intermissions), the audience concentrates on a three-tiered cube design containing personages who repeat words and sounds (comprised of a paragraph read forty-three times, or solfège syllables and numerals) to the amplified accompaniment of synthesizers, woodwinds, and a chorus. There are no singing characters as such, and the character representing Einstein is an “amateur” violinist who plays from the orchestra pit.

On the occasion of a 1992 revival of Einstein on the Beach at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Glass described this opera as a theater piece that offers audiences a different kind of experience from that daily experienced with the world of television. In fact, Glass defines the concept behind Einstein as the “opposite of television,” for it offers audiences viewing the staged production time to think; they are not “bombarded with the quick cutting of television or the kind of very exterior theater seen on Broadway.”⁸² If nothing else, Einstein has forever altered our preconceived ideas of staged happenings and their relation to time.

The second opera in Glass’s triptych of portraits about men whose revolutionary ideas affected the world in which they lived is Satyagraha (1981), an epic about nonviolence as expressed by one episode in the life of Mahatma Gandhi: his struggle for Indian civil liberties in South Africa from 1893 to 1914.⁸³ The opera is sung in Sanskrit, the language of the Bhagavad-Gita from which Constance DeJong derived her libretto,⁸⁴ and is scored for a normal orchestra, but without brass or percussion. Each of the three acts is associated with a figure (silently positioned high on a platform above the stage) who symbolizes the spirit of nonviolence that has pulsated through other times and other places: Leo Tolstoy, Rabindranath Tagore, and Martin Luther King Jr. So closely related is the minimal technique to Indian music that the score gives the illusion of presenting Indian ragas, as in the 140 repetitions of the opening four-chord progression by the lower strings.⁸⁵ Staging and music combine in Satyagraha to produce a hypnotic effect on the audience to the extent that Gandhi’s final blessing repeated over every one of his thirty comrades, becomes a “sound gesture,” which audiences take with them as they depart from the theater.

Akhnaten (1984), the third opera of the triptych, chronicles the rise and fall of an Egyptian pharaoh whose reign (c. 1375–58 B.C.E.) was marked by religious, judicial, and cultural reforms. Akhnaten, son of King Amenhotep III, was crowned pharaoh upon his father’s death. Declaring himself a descendant of Aten, a sun god, Akhnaten decreed that his subjects should worship that god exclusively and ordered a city built in the god’s honor. He resided in that city with his wife, Nefertiti, and became so immersed in religious devotions that his kingdom crumbled from neglect. He lost the throne, and the city was ultimately destroyed. In the final scene of the opera the ruins are visited by tourists and by the ghost of Akhnaten. The opera is sung in the original languages of the quoted materials from which the libretto is drawn—Egyptian, Hebrew, and Akkadian; the narrator of the opera’s action speaks in the vernacular of the audience in attendance. The score, which calls for an orchestra without violins, exhibits the same minimalist style of Glass’s earlier compositions, with the endlessly repeated melodic patterns sustained by slowly changing harmonies giving a sense of time transcended.

To commemorate the five hundredth anniversary of the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus, the Metropolitan Opera commissioned Glass to write an opera to be performed in October 1992. The resulting work was Voyage, set to a libretto by David Henry Hwang, with sets and designs by Robert Wilson. Interestingly, the opera views the arrival of Columbus in the New World as an event that has its dark side and treats Columbus’s act of “discovery” as merely a much-discussed manifestation of a universal phenomenon—the desire to seek the unknown—that has challenged human beings since the beginning of time. The opera opens with a prologue, in which a wheelchair-bound scientist ponders why humans continually search for knowledge. Act I centers on the arrival on planet Earth of a spaceship of explorers from the Ice Age; Act II is more introspective and focuses on Columbus at sea; Act III takes place in the year 2092, when the Earthlings finally gain evidence that there once were Ice Age visitors and they set off into outer space to find them. The opera, however, is as much about human voyaging into the inner space of the mind as it is about voyaging into outer space. The singers have almost no opportunity for virtuoso singing, for the text is set in a very straightforward manner. The vocal parts, however, are difficult to execute, for Glass tends to write them in the uppermost part of a singer’s range. Throughout the score, the orchestra (which is very large) functions as the primary vehicle for conveying the drama. As has so often been heard in works by Glass, the instrumental writing exhibits the use of cellular motifs, contrapuntal textures, scalar or arpeggiated figuration, and repeated rhythmic patterns.

Glass is a prolific composer and continues to compose music for theatrical productions. For example, after Voyage, his opera Orphée, based on Jean Cocteau’s Orphée, was performed at Boston and at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1993. One of his more recent creations is Monsters of Grace (1999), produced in collaboration with Robert Wilson. Computer-generated imagery transformed this opera’s staging into a three-dimensional event, causing at least one reviewer to describe the work as a “digital opera.”

EVENTS OF AMERICAN HISTORY and literature fuel the subjects of many American operas, but seldom have current events emerged as the stuff of which operas are made. Such is the case, however, with Anthony Davis’s X, The Life and Times of Malcolm X (1986), about the black-nationalist leader Malcolm X; John Moran’s Manson Family (1990), about the mass-murderer Charles Manson; and two operas by John Adams (b. 1947), Nixon in China (1987) and The Death of Klinghoffer (1991).⁸⁶ Nixon in China chronicles the historic meetings held between Chairman Mao of China and President Richard Nixon of the United States. Adams has described his musical style for this opera as being “the least minimal of the minimalist composers,”⁸⁷ for although the three characteristic elements of minimalism—regular pulse, repetitive structures, and a tonal language with slowly changing harmonic rhythm—are present in his music, the pace at which his harmonic rhythm changes is relatively rapid in order to express the many shifts of mood found in the opera.⁸⁸ The orchestra is made up of a few strings, trumpets, trombones, woodwinds, percussion, a synthesizer, and two electronic pianos. The first act focuses on Nixon’s arrival in Beijing and his meeting with Chairman Mao Tse-Tung (Zedong) and includes the banquet scene in which Nixon renounces his negative attitude toward China. The second act is more introspective and curiously finds the Nixons stepping into the “Red Detachment of Women” ballet and becoming enveloped in revolutionary violence. The third and final act explores the thoughts of the principal protagonists on this historical encounter. Throughout the score there is a constant layering of orchestral textures, undergirded by subtle nuances of rhythmic design.

Adams’s second opera, The Death of Klinghoffer, concerns the 1985 hijacking of a cruise ship by Palestinian terrorists and their subsequent killing of Klinghoffer, a wheelchair-bound American Jewish passenger. Political controversy erupted over a perceived bias toward the Palestinians in the opera’s retelling of the story, and this in turn tended to discourage additional productions.⁸⁹ The style of this opera drifts away from minimalism and moves toward a more dissonant polytonality. It is a darker score than Nixon in China and one in which the chorus plays a major role, as evidenced by the stunning choral number in Act I. A third opera I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky continued Adams’s interest in the political ramifications of current events, in this case the 1994 earthquake in Los Angeles.

Another composer who took a news story as the subject for an opera was Stephen Wallace (b. 1960),⁹⁰ whose Harvey Milk (1995) relates how two government officials in San Francisco—a gay supervisor (Harvey Milk) and the mayor (George Mascone)—were murdered in 1978 by a fellow government official and former policeman. The opera begins with the news account of the killing and then, by means of flashbacks, weaves together the story of Harvey Milk’s life, from his first trip to the Metropolitan Opera at the age of fifteen and his subsequent encounter with other gay men in Central Park to that fateful day in 1978. The score embraces many different styles, ranging from Middle Eastern liturgical music and medieval polyphony to American folk music and jazz.

DURING THE 1990s, elements considered to be necessary components of operatic composition and production were reexamined and redefined, leading to some unusual works for the stage. What several of these works hold in common is a conscious effort to draw inspiration from a juxtaposition of Asian and European-American cultures.⁹¹ This is especially true for those composed by Chinese-born musicians, some of whom now reside in the United States. Their operas offer a different perspective of China and its culture than that addressed by Nixon in China, which focused on a political confrontation of East and West.

Tan Dun (b. 1957) began his career at the Peking Opera, then studied at Beijing’s Central Conservatory before coming to the United States for additional graduate work at Columbia University. Early in the 1990s, he read Paul Griffiths’s 1989 novel Myself and Marco Polo and found himself captivated by the idea of writing an opera about this thirteenth-century traveler. What came into being was Marco Polo (Munich, 1996), an “opera within an opera,” that combines the operatic traditions of East and West. There is no “story” as such. The principal character’s name is segmented into two separate roles: Marco, the traveler, and Polo, who represents that traveler’s memory of the journey made from Italy to China. To emphasize the changes in geography and the four seasons as they are experienced by the traveler, Tan incorporates into the score different styles and timbres—from the opening shrill vocal sounds of Peking opera to medieval European chant, from music that is indigenous to India, Tibet, and China to music that is decidedly rooted in the West. Marco Polo, performed without intermission, takes on the characteristics of a ritualistic “happening”; the personages on stage move very slowly, their stylized dance conveying a cerebral contemplation of “journeying” that for Tan exists on three levels: psychological, geographical, and musical.

In 1998 Peter Sellars brought to the Vienna stage his version of a four-hundred-year-old Chinese opera Peony Pavilion. Music for this greatly abbreviated version of the original was derived from traditional kunju opera, China’s oldest surviving theatrical style,⁹² and from newly composed material by Tan Dun. The scoring calls for pipa (lute), dizi (bamboo flute), percussion, synthesizers, MIDI horns, and pre-recorded choral parts. Although Tan’s music earned high praise, especially his choral music, Sellar’s production was considered by many critics to be a flawed event. This was in marked contrast to another production that was coincidentally taking place in June of this same year: the original Chinese opera Peony Pavilion was revived to great acclaim, first in New York and then in a number of other cities (Sydney, Hong Kong, Paris, Munich, and Shanghai, to name but a few). Unlike most other forms of Chinese opera, the music for kunju (also spelled kunqu) operas of the sixteenth century was notated, thereby making it possible to revive Peony Pavilion. In its complete version of fifty-five scenes, the opera takes about twenty hours to perform, necessitating the staging of this epic drama to be spread over several days.

With the availability of Chinese opera in all its myriad forms being brought to the stages of non-Asian countries with ever greater frequency, many contemporary composers, especially those who are Chinese Americans, have understandably sought inspiration from them for their own works. For example, Bright Sheng’s (b. 1955) Chinese heritage has influenced many of his compositions, as is evident in the one-act opera The Song of Majnun (1992), which had its premiere at Lyric Opera of Chicago. Bun-Ching Lam also melds aspects of Chinese and Western music in her chamber opera The Child God (1993). The protagonists are shadow figures; they enact an ancient Chinese legend about a young man who, after slaying a dragon, has his attitudes about wielding the sword transformed by a vision of paradise. A narrator (spoken role) is used to relate the legend in English; the singer (who assumes the role for each of the shadow figures) declaims in Chinese, with vocal styles varying from the high-pitched Chinese vocal line to that of a more traditional Western style. The pentatonic scale is introduced, as are traditional Chinese instruments, the zheng and pipa, which join with bass clarinet and percussion for the vocal accompaniment.

Between Two Worlds, a two-act opera by Shulamit Ran (b. 1949), had its highly acclaimed premiere at Lyric Opera of Chicago in 1997. The libretto by Charles Kondek was fashioned from The Dybbuk, a drama in four acts written by Salomon Ansky in 1920. The spirit of a woman’s dead husband has taken possession of her body, and she is caught in the conflict between the spirit realm and the real world until a rite of exorcism is performed. To dramatize these two worlds, Ran used a number of devices, not the least of them being amplified voices to represent the former and acoustical voices, the latter. The drama has an Eastern European Jewish setting, which the composer, a native of Israel, has accentuated by introducing Hasidic laments and klezmer folk dances.

TO CELEBRATE ITS CENTENNIAL, the Metropolitan Opera commissioned The Ghosts of Versailles (1988) by John Corigliano (b. 1938).⁹³ That this particular composer should have been chosen for the honor says much about the respect his instrumental works had achieved, for it was on this basis that he was chosen and not on his experience within the realm of the theater. The Ghosts of Versailles, subtitled “a grand opera buffa,” is Corigliano’s first opera. In addition to its very successful premiere in New York, it has been staged in a number of other cities and produced for television.

The opera takes place two hundred years after the French Revolution and presents to the audience the ghosts of that historic event, with Marie Antoinette’s beheading forming the central focus of the “serious” aspect of the opera. In the opening scene, Marie Antoinette sings a very moving monologue in which she decries the recurring nightmares she has of those final days of her life as queen—from her imprisonment, to the taunting by the crowds as she was taken in a cart to the site of the guillotine, and finally her execution. No sooner has she had an opportunity to vent her anger than the audience becomes aware that the historical account has been overlaid with a fictional love story involving Marie Antoinette and Beaumarchais (who did indeed serve the French court). The exploration of this relationship forms the outer framework of the opera, but within this framework another play/opera is staged by Beaumarchais in the Versailles theater to entertain the aristocracy. Having an opera within an opera is, of course, not unique to The Ghosts of Versailles; this format has been used effectively by a number of composers, not the least of them Strauss (Ariadne) and Weisgall (Six Characters).

Corigliano wanted to bring back to life not only Marie Antoinette but also Figaro, Almaviva, and Rosina, characters originally created by Beaumarchais. He and his librettist, William M. Hoffmann, turned to the playwright’s trilogy, intending to use part three, La Mère coupable (The Guilty Mother), as the basis for a play/opera within the main opera, but finding the plot dramatically weak, they decided to freely adapt it, while retaining the play’s characters. An onstage buffo orchestra accompanies this play/opera and the characters are given material to sing that resembles portions of operas by Mozart and Rossini, such as the famous patter-type songs.⁹⁴ Corigliano calls this technique “giving the fragrance” of the Mozart/Rossini material.

The Ghosts of Versailles somewhat resembles a late eighteenth-century opera in the sense that the score emphasizes melody and consists of recitatives, arias, and ensembles. A synthesizer in the orchestra pit, however, is a novel addition, for it is the first time this instrument was used for a production at the Metropolitan Opera. It serves as the source for the sonic backdrop to the ghosts. The opera opens with the intensely dramatic monologue by Marie Antoinette, described above. Here and elsewhere when there is a flashback to the days leading up to the Revolution the dramatic power of Corigliano’s writing is strikingly revealed.

Throughout the opera, there are scenes in which the respective worlds of the ghosts and the “Figaro” characters become intertwined. One such scene concludes Act I: it is a farce set in a Turkish embassy and involves the participation of both the aristocratic ghosts and the characters in the play/opera, accompanied by the pit and onstage orchestras. They are also joined by forty kazoo players who march across the stage. Throughout the opera, the boundaries between the outer opera and the inner play/opera often become blurred, as in the scene where one of the characters objects to a line in Beaumarchais’ play, causing the playwright to mount the stage and take part in his own play, as he attempts (unsuccessfully) to alter history and save Marie Antoinette from the guillotine.

Corigliano draws upon a wide range of musical styles for The Ghosts. He also infuses the opera with numerous layers of dramatic and musical meaning. Especially notable is the clarity with which the lyrics are conveyed to the audience, a feat the composer has achieved by writing the vocal parts in comfortable ranges for the cast and by thinning the orchestral accompaniment so that the instrumentalists do not overpower the singers. Although at least one critic considered The Ghosts to be “deeply flawed,”⁹⁵ there can be no denying that Corigliano created an opera that is accessible and appealing to a wide audience, as evidenced by the revivals and the production for television.

ALTHOUGH CHAMBER AND SINGLE-ACT OPERAS remained in vogue throughout the second half of the twentieth century, an entirely different concept of writing them is represented by Central Park (1999), a trilogy of one-act operas by three American composer-librettist teams. The New York City Opera initiated this project by engaging three well-known playwrights and asking each to write a libretto that would have as its locale New York’s Central Park. Three composers were invited to set these librettos, and out of this collaborative effort came three self-contained one-act operas intended for performance as a “triple bill”: The Festival of Regrets (libretto, Wendy Wasserstein; music, Deborah Drattell), which takes place at the Bethesda Fountain in the park; Strawberry Fields, the title referring to a specific section of Central Park (libretto, A. R. Gurney; music, Michael Torke); and The Food of Love (libretto, Terrence McNally; music, Robert Beaser), which is set at the Central Park Zoo.

The Festival of Regrets is centered on a Jewish New Year ritual whose observants toss bread crumbs into the water as a symbolic gesture for ridding themselves of their sins and regrets. As the ritual is about to begin, one of the participants recognizes her ex-husband and his very young girlfriend among those gathered with the rabbi by the fountain. The divorced couple express their regrets for their marital problems, and as the curtain falls the audience is left with the suggestion that this couple may rekindle the love which they once felt for each other.

Strawberry Fields tells of an elderly woman, an avid opera fan, who joins a young graduate student on a park bench. Once seated, she fully believes she is attending an opera production at the Metropolitan Opera, as had been her custom in bygone days. Her son arrives and, knowing full well that his mother is suffering from dementia, intends to move her out of her apartment that overlooks Central Park to a nursing home. She, however, refuses to go with him. Her son goes off to get help from his sister and while he is gone, the woman comments to the student about the people passing by, equating them with characters in the opera she imagines is taking place before her very eyes. When the son returns with a nurse, his sister, and a wheelchair, he is confronted by a crowd that supports the woman’s right to her independence. As each character thinks through the situation at hand, they fail to notice that the woman has slumped over on the bench and has died.

The Food of Love centers on a homeless woman who comes daily to the Central Park Zoo, looking for someone who might be willing to care for her newborn baby. Her petitions to various people walking in the park are met with the inevitable rejections. The constant repetition of her plight to various persons at the zoo becomes somewhat wearisome and this part of the opera trilogy soon wears thin.⁹⁶

Scene from Central Park: Strawberry Fields by Michael Torke and A. R. Gurney. The Student, Jeffrey Lent; the Old Lady, Joyce Castle; the Workman, Daniel Ihasz.

(PHOTO, ©1999 GEORGE MOTT. COURTESY OF GLIMMERGLASS OPERA, COOPERSTOWN, N.Y.)

AS THE TWENTIETH CENTURY drew to a close, two highly anticipated opera productions based on classics of American literature took place within a year of each other. The first, commissioned by San Francisco Opera, was André Previn’s (b. 1929) A Streetcar Named Desire (1998), after Tennessee Williams’s play.⁹⁷ Interestingly, music had a very significant role in the original play. The very first stage direction reads: “music of Negro entertainers at a barroom around the corner.” This barroom music, to be played on a “tinny piano,” recurs several times in the course of the drama. Also called for are a rumba, a waltz, several popular songs (“It’s Only a Paper Moon”), and the “Varsouviana” polka that serves to underscore some of the most important dramatic moments of the play. Previn’s interpretation of Williams’s play does not incorporate these specific musical directions, nor does his score embrace the jazz idiom of New Orleans, the city in which the play takes place. What his score does provide is a wealth of well-defined arias, composed in an accessible style.

The second opera, commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera, was The Great Gatsby (1999) by John Harbison (b. 1938), who created his own libretto from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s work of the same title.⁹⁸ Fitzgerald’s novel mentions several popular songs of the 1920s, but Harbison did not use them in his score. Instead, he composed seventeen pieces in the style of music that was popular in the 1920s. Some were vocal numbers (with lyrics supplied by Murray Horwitz); others were dance numbers, such as Charlestons, rumbas, and foxtrots. Harbison also drew musical ideas from such widely divergent traditions as jazz and the Baroque era, skillfully weaving them together with his popular songs to create the appropriate historical setting within which the opera takes place. The premiere production of The Great Gatsby engendered a fair amount of criticism for its length and “lack of vitality,”⁹⁹ but it also received considerable praise, especially for Harbison’s excellent compositional style that was most apparent in the substantial orchestral interludes that accommodated scene changes.

Another American literary classic, Little Women, provided the basis for an opera by Mark Adamo (b. 1962), whose dramatically effective libretto captures the essence of the New England post–Civil War era of Louisa May Alcott’s 1868 novel. Critical acclaim for the initial production of Little Women—composed for and first staged by the Houston Grand Opera Studio in 1998—quickly brought the opera into the offerings for the 1999–2000 season of Houston’s main opera house.¹⁰⁰ Although the resources required to produce this two-act opera are modest (a cast of ten soloists, a chamber orchestra, a quartet of female voices for an offstage chorus [SSAA], and a single set that offers multilevel staging), the score itself places great demands on the singers. Bravura passages soaring to the uppermost regions of a singer’s range are juxtaposed to passages that explore the lowest registers. A wide range of musical styles prevails, from the twelve-tone writing in the recitatives to the melody-driven Broadway-sounding arias, but the manner in which Adamo adapts these various styles to the score is uniquely personal. Set numbers (arias, duets, and ensembles) provide opportunities for finely drawn characterizations of the protagonists, while frequent repetition of motifs and phrases within a number effectively enhances these characterizations, as in the reenactment of the parents’ wedding vows in Act I.

With the dawn of the new century, there is every indication that operas by Americans, about Americans, will continue to be successfully launched by the major operas companies of the United States. Several, such as Floyd’s Cold Sassy Tree, have already been mentioned. Another is a two-act opera, Dead Man Walking, by Jake Heggie (b. 1962) on a topic that is as contemporary as it is timeless. This commissioned work was undertaken with librettist Terrence McNally; their collaboration produced a dramatically intense theatrical event for the San Francisco Opera in October 2000. Dead Man Walking is based on Sister Helen Prejean’s account of her experiences as a spiritual advisor to a convicted rapist and murderer on death row.¹⁰¹ Her interaction with the prisoner moved her to petition the federal government to abolish the death penalty. At the apex of Heggie’s emotionally charged score is the plea that the mother makes to spare her son’s life. Heggie writes in an accessible style in which the melodic material is molded to the voice. Finely crafted ensembles and deftly handled orchestrations add to the effective portrayal of this controversial subject. Prior to composing this, his first opera, Heggie had already established himself as a gifted writer for the voice; his art songs are widely recognized as extremely valuable contributions to the genre.

THE APPEARANCE OF JOHN CAGE (1912–92) and his music to conclude this chapter on American opera by composers living in America may surprise those familiar with the disdain this composer held for the genre prior to 1986. Rarely had he attended an operatic performance. His excuse was twofold: he was not particularly fond of the wide vibrato cultivated by opera singers nor did he wish to be entertained with an art form that seemed to cater to the wealthier strata of society. In light of this, it is all the more interesting that he accepted an opera commission from Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Reiner Riehn, artistic directors of Oper Frankfurt. The operatic project these two directors had in mind involved finding a composer who could create a work for the theater that would “close the European opera tradition.”¹⁰² In other words, they believed that Cage, in fulfilling the commission, would most assuredly negate the operatic genre as we know it.¹⁰³ How wrong they were! Cage created a most unusual comedy that thoroughly engaged those who attended one of the staged performances in Frankfurt (1987),¹⁰⁴ Purchase, New York (1988), or Zurich (1991).

Although Cage is the creator of Europeras 1 & 2, he wrote absolutely nothing that is seen or heard on stage or in the orchestra pit.¹⁰⁵ Instead, he derived his material from preexisting sources, fragmenting representative items from an opera repertoire that extends from Gluck to Puccini into a myriad number of segments, thereby creating “a collage of sight and sound that transcends the conventions of traditional opera and breaks open the boundaries of theatrical space.”¹⁰⁶ He arranged these musical and nonmusical elements—arias, orchestral music, scenery, lighting. props, costumes, and stage blocking—by chance operations, aided by computer-generated printouts of the I Ching that enhanced his ability to structure the parameters within which all aspects of the production would occur.¹⁰⁷ Strictly controlled time limits governed the performances, which take place with no backdrop to hide backstage activities. Props, scenery, and persons involved with every aspect of the production are always onstage even when they are supposed to be offstage. Thus the stagehands and technicians are elevated to the status of protagonists.

Throughout the course of the opera’s two “acts,”¹⁰⁸ a fairly sizable cast of singers (ten for the first act and nine for the second) present their own preselected excerpts from the opera repertoire and declaim them in costumes that represent operas that are not the same as the material being sung. Thus an excerpt from Carmen might be sung in a costume from Die Walküre.¹⁰⁹ Of course, the arias being sung have nothing whatsoever to do with the actions on the stage. The orchestral material is taken from the same repertoire as the vocal excerpts, but since the selection process is by chance, fragments of accompaniments are performed that are in no way coordinated with the excerpts being sung. Moreover, thematic material that would have been presented in the original scores by an upper string or woodwind might now be given, by chance, to a bass instrument. This can produce some hilarious moments, especially when a highly recognizable melody associated with a flute is presented by a double bass. Dancers, dressed in black and white, also assist with the stage action. The sets (consisting of thirty-six flats) and props appear and disappear by chance, often blocking the audience’s view of a singer.¹¹⁰ Stage lighting is also by chance and therefore rarely highlights important events on stage. This means that a spotlight may be trained on a stagehand moving a prop while a singer is presenting his or her aria in a darkened corner of the stage.

Scene from Europeras 1 & 2 by John Cage, from the Frankfurt Oper Production, December 1987. Upper part of stage scene shows neck and shoulders of the composer Bellini. 

(PHOTO, © MARA EGGERT. COURTESY OF THE JOHN CAGE TRUST)

The success of Cage’s comic opera depends upon the collective memory of an audience well-acquainted with the standard opera repertoire. This memory is called upon even before the initial action takes place on the stage, for from the moment members of the audience assemble in the theater and begin to read the program, they become involved in the chance-determined production. For example, the program for the Pepsico Summerfare production carried twelve different pairs of synopses, each formed out of stereotypical plots telescoped nonsensically into two brief paragraphs that are meant to correspond to the first and second “acts.”¹¹¹ One of these pairs is given below:

1

She after a long life has fallen in his palace, and consequently refuses plans to marry. He bemoans her absence. She asks for many pranks and much confusion. It is love at first sight; however, he expresses himself later and is banished. Their mood is suddenly dead; she sends him away.

2

They are in love. Raised in a cave, he vows to reveal his identity, thus freeing her to refuse his son’s request. They tell him he is invited to take holy orders. Transforming himself into a monstrous dragon, with the evil one’s help they meet. Twenty-five years pass. He repents. She manages to make him yield, but in the end remains completely docile: she returns.¹¹²

The synopses, of course, are meant to recall recognizable clichés from other opera plots, thereby initiating the process that is about to unfold on the stage. In addition, a one-minute and fifty-second black-and-white film of chance-determined segments from Europeras 1 & 2 plays continuously on a small screen in the lobby of the theater for the benefit of the audience as they congregate before the performance and during the intermission. Cage has described Europeras 1 & 2 as a kind of circus, but it is a well-ordered circus, for “in this comedy, ever-changing in its musical materials and scenic designs, bits and pieces of European operas coalesce into a dramatic event that celebrates unity in utter diversity.”¹¹³

HERE OUR SURVEY of the history of opera ends. It is sad to think that so much beauty lies buried in the silence of the past, that so much of what pleased our forebears has been all but submerged in the inexorable flow of history. Operas of the past, however, need not disappear. They can live again, not only in our imagination but also on the stage, where their movement, color, and sound can still exalt us. But we must not be satisfied merely to have “the past, like an inspired rhapsodist, fill the theatre of everlasting generations with her harmony.”¹¹⁴ The old should be balanced by the new, for history is both a return and a beginning. As we restore the past, we must also listen to the future. It is there that, out of a meeting of East and West and in the rhythms of new life together, as yet unheard sounds of the operatic realm are being fashioned.

1. The uniqueness of The Girl of the Golden West is that it is the first mainstream American opera with a Western plot. It even calls for horses to be used in the production, a fact alluded to by Stravinsky when he denigrated the work as “the perfect horse opera.”

2. On Damrosch, see chapter twenty-four.

3. Although operas were being composed by American women, very few were professionally staged prior to the 1950s. Amy Beach (1867–1944), for example, composed Cabildo in 1932 but the opera was never produced in her lifetime. Not until 1995 was her opera given a professional performance; it took place at New York.

4. Mona was the winner of a Metropolitan opera competition; Fairyland was the winner of a competition sponsored by the National Federation of Music Clubs.

5. For more on Herbert, see chapter twenty-four.

6. The first performance was at Atlanta, Georgia, in 1972 and a fully staged performance, with newly created orchestration by Gunther Schuller, was mounted at Houston, Texas, in 1975. Although Joplin orchestrated the score in 1915, the orchestrated version has since disappeared. Also in the 1970s, a Pulitzer Prize was awarded, posthumously, to Joplin for Treemonisha. See Reed, “Scott Joplin: Pioneer.”

7. Kimball and Bolcom, Reminiscing with Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake.

8. Other works by Antheil include Helen Retires (1934), and four operas written in the 1950s: Volpone, The Brothers, The Wish, and Venus in Africa.

9. Quoted in P. Smith, The Tenth Muse, 399.

10. Quoted in Libby, “How the ‘Saints’ Came Together in Paris.” For more about Virgil Thomson, in general, and The Four Saints, in particular, see Tommasini and Watson, respectively.

11. Thomson’s third and last opera, Lord Byron, was set to a libretto by Jack Larson and first performed at the Juilliard School of Music in New York in 1972, but it lacks the spontaneity and charm of Thomson’s first two operas and therefore is not likely to have many revivals.

12. Thomson reveals his compositional ideals in his autobiography (1966).

13. Andrew Porter, in Music of Three Seasons, 1974–1977, 270, has called this “one of the most daring slow curtains in opera.”

14. For a detailed study of this opera, see Alpert, The Life and Times of Porgy and Bess. Cf. Durham, DuBose Heyward: The Man Who Wrote Porgy. See also studies of Gershwin’s music by D. Ewen and Goldberg. Prior to the writing of Porgy and Bess, Gershwin had enjoyed a number of successful productions on Broadway. Among them were Lady Be Good (1924), memorable for a score that makes use of syncopated rhythms in songs such as “Fascinating Rhythm,” and Of Thee I Sing (1931), a political satire that won a Pulitzer Prize for best play.

15. “Folk opera” was a descriptive term favored by Gershwin. See his remarks in an article published in The New York Times (October 20, 1935).

16. It is misleading, perhaps, to characterize any of the versions that have been produced as “complete,” for in addition to the autograph full score and pencil sketches of Porgy and Bess in the Library of Congress there is also a scene for Bess and Serena, intended for Act III, that has never been staged; it lacks orchestration. This scene, which contains a solo for Bess and a duet for Bess and Serena, can be found in Gershwin’s pencil short score. For more on the performance history of Porgy and Bess and a discussion of supporting documents, see Hamm, “The Theatre Guild Production of Porgy and Bess” See also Armitage, ed., George Gershwin.

17. See Berger, Aaron Copland; Pollack, Aaron Copland; Copland and Perlis, Copland 1900–1942; idem, Copland since 1943; and Copland’s own writings.

18. The movement to advance the creation and performance of American music by native composers and at the same time to encourage the writing of works that would speak to the community as a whole was initiated by Arthur Farwell (1877–1952), a musician, publisher (Wa-Wan Press), and chief music critic for Musical America. The 1950s witnessed the fruits of Farwell’s American music movement.

19. Copland assigned the younger daughter, said to be ten years old, a speaking rather than a singing role.

20. This reduction in scoring was skillfully done so as not to disturb the effectiveness of the orchestral scene-painting that was achieved in the original version.

21. See Perlis, “A New Chance for The Tender Land”; Pollack, Aaron Copland. To date, some writers on Copland’s music are either unaware of the Long Wharf production or are unwilling to acknowledge that earlier criticisms of the score may no longer be valid. By contrast, many of those who attended the 1987 production (this author included) came away convinced of the merits of the Brown/Sidlin chamber opera version.

22. Weitzel, “A Melodic Analysis of Selected Vocal Solos in the Operas of Douglas Moore”; Gleason and Becker, eds., 20th-Century American Composers, 129–37; Edmunds and Boelzner, Some Twentieth-Century American Composers.

23. In 1957, the Ford Foundation awarded the New York City Opera a sizeable grant designed specifically to sponsor a season of American opera in 1958. The grant was aimed at reviving previously composed operas, as opposed to commissioning new works. Those composers whose works were produced as a result of this grant included Moore, Floyd, Bucci, Giannini, Still, Menotti, and Blitzstein. The positive response generated by the 1958 and the 1959 seasons encouraged the New York City Opera to continue their support for new works, especially those by American composers, and that support continues to the present day.

24. The first performance took place in Bronxville, N.Y.

25. See Beeson, “In Memoriam: Douglas Moore (1893–1969): An Appreciation, Written in a Country Churchyard.”

26. Copland, The New Music, 1900–1960, 144.

27. The New York City Opera, for example, revived Regina in 1992.

28. See Shout, “The Musical Theater of Marc Blitzstein.” See also E. Gordon, Mark the Music: The Life and Work of Marc Blitzstein.

29. Blitzstein had written several essays for Modern Music in 1935 and 1936 that were critical of Die Dreigroschenoper. Not until he attended a lecture on the opera, delivered by Weill in 1936, did he change his perception of the work.

30. For Blitzstein’s own account of how his adaptation came into being, see his “Threepenny Opera is Back.”

31. See List, “A Musical Brief for Gangsterism.”

32. A New York City Opera production, in German, occurred in 1965. A new English adaptation by Ralph Mannheim and John Willett was staged by Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival in 1976, and another English adaptation by Michael Feingold was used for a Broadway theater production in 1989.

33. This interview was with William G. King and published in the New York Sun (February 3, 1940). For excerpts, see Taylor, Kurt Weill: Composer in a Divided World, 251–53.

34. Lost in the Stars is a black American folk opera that draws upon Harlem-styled jazz and American country ballads for its musical material.

35. The New York Tribune (January 15, 1947), for example, had this headline: “Street Scene, Real American Opera.”

36. The full letter is quoted in Schebera, Kurt Weill: An Illustrated Life, 316–17. Weill also created operas for other types of venues. For example, Down in the Valley was originally written as a radio opera but was never broadcast. Weill later revised and expanded the score for a stage production at the University of Indiana (Bloomington, 1948). It quickly became very popular with opera workshops and amateur opera companies.

37. The first version of this opera by Dello Joio was The Triumph of Joan, performed at Sarah Lawrence College in 1950. A second version devised for a television production was entitled The Trial at Rouen (1956). The Triumph of Saint Joan represents the third and final version.

38. Although Bucci has written several operatic works, only Tale for a Deaf Ear and The Hero have had professional productions. Bucci’s style of composition reflects the music of Vittorio Giannini and Aaron Copland, with whom he studied.

39. The Good Soldier Schweik was originally composed in 1956 as an orchestral suite, consisting of six character pieces. Kurka expanded the suite into a two-act opera, for which the orchestration was completed by Hershy Kay after the composer’s death. The opera was produced by New York City Opera in 1958.

40. A revised version of Ward’s The Crucible was first performed in New York in 1968. Ward wrote several other operas, including Lady Kate (1994), which is a revision of his The Lady of Colorado (1964).

41. See Gunden, The Music of Vivian Fine.

42. These and the other three or four operas of Still that were never performed were written between the 1930s and the late 1950s.

43. Troubled Island was produced by the New York City Opera in the 1958–59 season. For a very interesting and, at the same time, disturbing account of the obstacles that were purposely placed in the way of staging Troubled Island in New York, see Kernodle, “Arias, Communists, and Conspiracies: The History of Still’s Troubled Island.”

44. Most Happy Fella was staged twice within the same 1991–92 season in New York—first at the New York City Opera and then at the Booth Theater for its third revival on Broadway.

45. Quoted in Gradenwitz, Leonard Bernstein, 171.

46. Gruen, “Reworking A Quiet Place for La Scala.”

47. For an analysis of the musical structure, see Gradenwitz, Leonard Bernstein, chap. 7.

48. Ibid., 185.

49. Rockwell, in “Urban Popular Song,” 217, presents a contrary opinion: “… Sweeney Todd belongs on the operatic stage far more deservedly than most of the new operas that jostle for position there.”

50. For example, Sweeney Todd was produced by the Houston Grand Opera and the New York City Opera in 1984, and in some theater productions, such as that of the Manchester Library Theatre, opera singers were used. Lyric Opera of Chicago has scheduled Sweeney Todd for a 2002 production, with one of the world’s leading operatic singers, Bryn Terfel, in the title role. Terfel obviously feels comfortable combining Eurocentric styles of singing with the popular styles required for the musicals, as do a number of other opera singers.

51. Bizet’s Carmen was transformed by Oscar Hammerstein II into Carmen Jones.

52. Banfield, Sondheim’s Broadway Musicals, 285.

53. This was the only American opera to be staged by the Metropolitan Opera in the late 1950s. A revised version of the opera was completed in 1964 and staged the following year by the Metropolitan Opera. Vanessa also holds the distinction of being the first American opera to be staged at the Salzburg Festival. See Broder, Samuel Barber; Heyman, Samuel Barber: The Composer and His Music.

54. The Consul was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the musical score and the New York Drama Critics Award for the play. This opera quickly achieved international success, with productions given in as many as twelve different languages.

55. For a discussion of Stravinsky’s dramatic works that were written and performed in Europe, see chapter twenty-five.

56. Following the successful production of The Rake’s Progress, Stravinsky was commissioned by Boston University to compose a second opera. He invited Dylan Thomas to provide the libretto, but the poet died before their collaboration could be fully realized. The draft of the libretto that Thomas completed before his death in 1953 centers on a subject that composer and poet mutually agreed upon: the rebirth of the world after a nuclear holocaust, as viewed through the lives of three survivors—an old man who predicted the nuclear catastrophe, a boy, and girl.

57. Stravinsky made this remark in connection with a BBC television documentary on Auden that was filmed in 1965. For the complete tribute to Auden, see Griffiths, Igor Stravinksy: The Rake’s Progress, 3.

58. In the second scene of the final act, Shadow meets Rakewell in the graveyard to claim his just reward—Rakewell’s soul. The clock begins to strike and Rakewell appears terrified by the consequences of his lifestyle, but Shadow stops the clock and suggests that Rakewell play a game of cards. If he guesses correctly the three cards that Shadow picks, he will be set free; if not, his soul belongs to Shadow. Rakewell manages to name the cards correctly and Shadow immediately vanishes, but Rakewell does not “go free”; he goes mad and is confined to Bedlam, where he will spend the rest of his days.

59. Six Characters invites comparison with Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos, which is also an opera within an opera.

60. Charles Kondek also wrote the libretto for Weisgall’s comic opera Will You Marry Me? that was commissioned and performed by the Opera Ensemble of New York in 1989. The libretto is based on Alfred Sutro’s A Marriage Has Been Arranged.

61. Bernheimer, “Hugo Weisgall’s Grandiose Esther Justifies a Festival.”

62. Cf. reviews by Davis and Redmond, among others, who expressed this opinion.

63. Beeson, “The Autobiography of Lizzie Borden.”

64. Levy retains the titles of these plays as titles for each of the three acts of the opera. Mourning Becomes Elektra has had revivals, such as the 1998 production by Lyric Opera of Chicago.

65. Reportedly, some administrative changes at the Metropolitan Opera caused the work to be withdrawn from production.

66. Paulus studied composition with, among others, Dominick Argento. Interest in writing chamber operas has continued throughout his career, as evidence by another work in this genre, Harmoonia (1991).

67. Interestingly, Floyd could readily relate to the dramatic scenario that he was creating, for he was the son of a Methodist minister and was raised in a small town in South Carolina.

68. Jonathan Abarbanel, “Program Notes” for a 1999 production of Susannah at the Metropolitan Opera.

69. This opera, based upon Emily Brönte’s novel, was revised by Floyd in 1959. Brönte’s novel also supplied Bernard Herrmann with the subject of his opera of the same title, composed in 1943 but not produced until 1982.

70. See articles by Eyer and Sabin.

71. Citizens of Paradise, commissioned for the opening of an arts center at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, has sometimes been labeled a song cycle, even though its premiere was presented as a staged monodrama. Floyd’s choice of material may have been influenced by a setting of twenty-two of Dickinson’s poems for soprano by Ernst Bacon (1898–1990), a composer with whom he was well acquainted.

72. Almost every line of the Shakespeare play is used by Hoiby for this opera.

73. Rockwell, “Opera: Hoiby’s The Tempest in Iowa.” Cf. Schmidgall, “A Long Voyage.”

74. Those six operas were: Sicilian Limes (1954); The Boor (1957), after Chekhov; Christopher Sly (1963), after Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew; The Masque of Angels (1964); The Shoemaker’s Holiday (1967), a ballad opera; and Colonel Jonathan the Saint (1971), a comedy in four acts.

75. For a discussion of the operas she composed before emigrating, see chapter twenty-eight.

76. Hagen’s most recent opera is Bandanna (1999); it consists of a prologue and two acts.

77. Shining Brow is an English translation of the Welsh word taliesin, the name of Wright’s home and studio.

78. See, for example, the operas of Claire Kessler, Wolfgang Fortner, and Bruno Maderna.

79. Another of Rieti’s operas is The Pet Shop (1958), a satire on New York’s high society.

80. Einstein on the Beach, for example, has had revivals in New York, Frankfurt, Melbourne, Barcelona, Madrid, Tokyo, and Stuttgart, with the last named city offering (in 1988) an entirely different stage production than that traditionally done with Wilson’s sets.

81. The premiere took place in Avignon, France. For studies of Glass’s operas see Coe, “Philip Glass Breaks Through”; Griffiths, Modern Music; Mertens, American Minimal Music; Kostelanetz, ed., Writings on Glass: Essays, Interviews, Criticism.

82. Oestreich, “What’s It All About, Albie?”

83. Satyagraha was commissioned by the Netherlands Opera. The set designs were by Robert Israel, who also created set designs for Glass’s Akhnaten and Voyage.

84. In the Bhagavad-Gita, DeJong finds a fitting parallel between the mythological story of Krishna imparting his wisdom to Arjuna on the battlefield and the struggles Ghandi faced in Africa.

85. Glass studied with Ravi Shankar in Paris and obviously took from that experience elements of melodic and rhythmic patterning that he could adapt to his own compositional palette.

86. One could rightly argue that Glass’s Satyagraha also fits this category, for the whole question of nonviolence continued to be front-page news in the 1980s, not only with respect to civil rights in the United Sates but also with the call for nonviolent protests against the political regime in South Africa.

87. See Sterritt’s interview with Adams prior to the Houston premiere: “John Adams and His Nixon in China,” 22.

88. An important characteristic of much minimalist music is the very slow rate at which harmonic rhythm changes within the tonal framework.

89. For a review of Klinghoffer that raises this issue of bias toward the Palestinians, see Rothstein, “Klinghoffer Sinks into Minimal Sea.”

90. Wallace has composed three other operas: Where’s Dick? (1987), The Kaballah (1989), and Hopper’s Wife (1997). The last named work concerns the abused wife of the artist Edward Hopper.

91. See, for example, The Cave (1993) by Steve Reich (b. 1936). This opera incorporates traditional music from the Near East in the form of chanting from the Torah and the Koran; it also involves interviews with persons (Israelis, Palestinians, and Americans) whose religious and cultural heritage stems from Abraham

92. A brief survey of the history and different types of Chinese opera is provided in the appendix.

93. The commission, however, was not fulfilled on time as can be seen by the date of the premiere. The original Metropolitan Opera House was inaugurated on October 22, 1883, with a production of Gounod’s Faust. The rise of the Metropolitan Opera company and its theater initiated competition with the other previously established opera company in New York at the Academy of Music.

94. Corigliano also parodies the orientalism found in Mozart’s music by including a scene near the end of Act I in which veiled dancers entertain the Pasha, accompanied by percussive and woodwind effects associated with music alla turca.

95. This opinion was expressed by Edward Rothstein in “Two Operas Make Hash of History,” a review that compares The Ghosts of Versailles with Philip Glass’s Voyage.

96. Several other opera trilogies, written either by a single composer or by a trio of different composers, have been staged since the early 1990s in the United States and abroad, as, for example, in Finland, where in the summer of 2000 The Age of Dreams (Aika ja uni—Rechberger; Kortekangas; K. Aho) was presented at the Savonlinna Festival. For more on this trilogy, see Hako, “The Age Is Born.”

97. The libretto is by Philip Littell.

98. This was not Harbison’s first opera; he had already enjoyed successful productions of A Winter’s Tale (1979; revised, 1991) and Full Moon in March (1979).

99. Following the premiere, Harbison took note of these criticisms and revised the score for subsequent productions at Chicago and New York. See Brody, “’Haunted by Envisioned Romance’: John Harbison’s Gatsby.”

100. Additional productions of Little Women have been, or are scheduled to be, staged by other opera companies, including Glimmerglass Opera/New York City Opera in 2002.

101. It was Terrence McNally who suggested the opera be based upon this much discussed book, which had already been made into a commercial film with the title Dead Man Walking.

102. Program notes for Europeras 1 & 2, Pepsico Summerfare, 46.

103. There was good precedent for them thinking this would be the case, for Kagel, Pousseur, and Ligeti, among others, had produced works for the stage that seemed designed to negate the operatic tradition as represented by the standard repertory.

104. The Frankfurt premiere was scheduled for November 15, 1987, but a fire at the Opera House three days earlier (presumably set by an arsonist) caused a change in the date of the premiere (December 17, 1987) and the theater (Schauspielhaus) where it was staged.

105. In the Pepsico Summerfare production (Purchase, N.Y.), the orchestra in the pit was elevated sufficiently so that the instrumentalists could be seen by the audience. There was no conductor for the orchestra; the instrumentalists coordinated their material by means of digital displays placed in various positions on stage. For an informative study of Europeras 1 & 2, see Kuhn, “Europeras 1 & 2: The Musical Means of Revolution.”

106. Williams, “Europera 3: Nationalism and Opera,” 743.

107. Music of Changes (1951) was one of the earliest works in which Cage based the musical organization on the I Ching, the Chinese “book of changes” that is consulted after one tosses a set of coins.

108. Europera 1 and Europera 2 correspond, respectively, to what traditionally would have been designated Act I and Act II.

109. Each time a singer performed an aria or duet, he or she had to appear in a different costume. “The costumes were selected by chance operations from a 19th-century 14-volume encyclopedia of world costumes.” See program notes for Europeras 1 & 2, Pepsico Summerfare (1988), 46.

110. The stage sets have images that represent nineteenth-century composers, singers, opera sets, and animals.

111. For the Frankfurt premiere, only one synopsis pair was printed per program, but twelve different programs, each with its own synopsis, were randomly distributed throughout the audience.

112. Program notes for Europeras 1 & 2, Pepsico Summerfare, 44.

113. Williams, “Europera 3: Nationalism and Opera,” 744. The title of this article was chosen before Cage created two other versions of his Europeras 1 & 2: Europeras 3 & 4 and Europera 5. Europeras 3 & 4 is not a sequel to Europeras 1 & 2; rather, this is the title Cage adopted for performances in 1991 at London, Berlin, Paris, and Strasbourg, where they were given without costumes, scenery, or props. Europera 5, given in Buffalo and New York, represents yet another version in which nineteenth-century operatic arias, his own instrumental music, radio broadcasts, and silent television vie for the audience’s attention. For Europeras 3 & 4 Cage used six singers, two pianists, one old Victrola, and six (pie-box type) record players that could accommodate a stack of long-playing records, organized by chance. In Europera 5 Cage reduced the performing forces to two singers, one piano, one Victrola, a radio, and a TV (which never utters a sound). According to Cage, “there is no pretense of twentieth-century opera” in this fifth and final version of the opera. For a more detailed description of Europeras 3 & 4 and Europera 5, see Retallack, ed., Musicage: Cage Muses on Word, Art, Music, 226.

114. The words of Shelley, as quoted in the preface to Altman et al., Theater Pictorial.