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Cold Sassy Tree (opera)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Cold Sassy Tree
Opera by Carlisle Floyd
Carlisle Floyd in 2004 with the National Medal of Arts
LanguageEnglish
Based onCold Sassy Tree
by Olive Ann Burns
Premiere
April 14, 2000 (2000-04-14)

Cold Sassy Tree is an opera composed by Carlisle Floyd, based on the 1984 novel by Olive Ann Burns.

Cold Sassy Tree was Floyd's tenth opera. It had its world premiere on April 14, 2000, at the Houston Grand Opera, with a production staged by Australian filmmaker Bruce Beresford and conducted by Patrick Summers. The original cast included Dean Peterson, Patricia Racette, Diane Alexander, Beth Clayton, Margaret Lloyd and John McVeigh. The production was the Houston Grand Opera's 25th new opera, and was created in a co-commission between the company and opera companies in Austin, Baltimore, North Carolina and San Diego.[1]

Floyd came to the project by way of a sibling. "The book was given to me by my sister, because she thought that somebody from this part of the world, the southeast, would probably fully appreciate it,” he said in an interview following the Houston premiere. “But, everywhere I have traveled in this country, people have read Cold Sassy Tree and the standard reaction from everybody, male and female, is 'I loved it.' Obviously, its appeal goes far beyond regional boundaries. What appealed to me most about it in terms of its operatic possibilities were the very vivid, rich characters. And it is also rich in comic incidents.”[2]

Cold Sassy Tree has been staged by regional opera countries around the United States. A two-disk CD recording featuring the original Houston Grand Opera cast was released in 2005 by Albany Records.[3] The Houston performance was videotaped for television, but it was never broadcast or released on DVD.[4]

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Transcription

Well, the first time we met was at Aspen where Carlisle had studied piano in the seasons before with Rudolf Firkusny and I simply was at Aspen and I had a phone call and there was Carlisle Floyd and he said that he had heard that I did a lot of new music and he had written this opera and could he bring it and show it to me. And I said "Please do because you'll have to help. I have been singing so much new music all summer I have no discretion left." And so, he came to my house and we read through all of Susannah. And it just was right there as normal as could be to me - the show, the person, the everything. And so, I called Mack Harrell, who was there, and said "Mack, this has happened can we come and play it to you?" And by the time the afternoon was over Mack and I both fell in love with this piece. Carlisle called his dean back at Florida State University and said that we had enjoyed this piece and his dean said, "Well, if you can get them to sing it, we'll give you a performance." And that's how we all met. We did Susannah first in Tallahassee. Then, when Mack and I went back to New York, we decided to sing it for a few people. One person, who ran a wonderful opera enterprise said, "But Phyllis, there's no boy meets girl in this piece." That took care of that one. But eventually we sung it to Eric Leinsdorf who lived near to Mack. And he liked it a lot. And that's how it got to the City Opera and...because for one season, Mr. Leinsdorf ran City Opera. And so that's how we got to City Opera. However, Mack was in Europe and couldn't do it and that's when Norman Treigle came in. And that's how we got started with Susannah. We sang it a lot of places -- did he tell you -- even Brussels in the World's Fair? Oh, it was very easily accepted. It's not a difficult thing to grasp in any way at all. It's all right there. It really, I would say, exemplifies what real opera is. You realize the story, everybody is there in the music. It's a remarkable coming together of people and music. And there's nothing in it that is off-putting in this day and age when people like to say about contemporary music all the curious things they do. But it's an easy piece. And I don't mean to suggest that's there anything ordinary about it. But it's available, and passionately so, in the music for every stretch of the way. So I don't think there was ever an audience that didn't react to this nicely. We were in a curious period with composition about that time. Carlisle's opera was largely being called by all kinds of people "a folk opera." Now why a folk opera? That text, that story, the center of it fits any number of societies in any number of ways. And so that sometimes to me seemed to me sort typical American Northeast and the South. Carlisle was a Southerner. Most of the composers and all that I knew were sort of Northeast. It was as if this was just somehow not in the same culture at all. It was a very peculiar attitude, but it struck very much to home a lot of the time. Well, it was sort of dismissed because it was a folk opera. Well, it's not a folk opera any more than Cavalieri Rusticana is a folk opera or Peter Grimes for heaven's sake. So that was annoyance to me. It also didn't fit, I suppose, into a lot of contemporary styles of composing at that point. It was a little in other kinds of music that I did, whether it was chamber music or song stuff. There were the far-out ones, and there were the neo-romantic ones, and it was like a civil war. If you sang this, you couldn't do that, and there was a big divide there. And that affected it to a degree, though when you think about one of the few others that was going around -- there was the Ballad of Baby Doe and there was hardly anything peculiar or strange or far-out about that. But I was not seeing, nor was anybody much, contemporary American opera. So it came along, but it's been fascinating - it's never stopped being played. Well, it was as easy as could be. Sometimes, people have asked to come and coach it with me and I say there's no reason to do that. It's all right there. If you read the story, if you hear the music, the music fits her every inch of the way and all you have to do listen and she emerges easily from there. You had asked if Carlisle helped me - your word was "build" - the role, and I thought, you know I never thought about building a role in my whole life. But she is just there, and I understood her or moved into her so easily. Now it may be that that's a part of the world that I grew up in myself. I was born in West Virginia, raised there, not so far away from that whole area of the Appalachian region and all the rest. But she is just as true as can be all the way through. There is nothing mysterious to look for. It's so genuine. So absolutely right on as a person that you don't have to search around for anything. But you have to make her Susannah. I would say the two arias - I never even considered them arias - "Ain't It a Pretty Night" is perhaps one of the most natural expressions of anything that I ever sang. "I just sat down on the porch and ain't it a pretty night," and it just goes on from there. It is a genuine and as real for anybody in the world, I think. And then the other one, "I sing it to myself when I'm sad and lonely." It says just that. And it hits a particular, emotional depth in a way that we all recognize that is going on, but we have something else that helps it go that is quite different. And that song is a little that way. And, I remember particularly at City Opera there was a memorial evening for Norman Treigle after he had died and Mr. Rudel asked if I'd sing "Ain't It a Pretty Night" and I said "No, I would rather sing he other one, 'The Trees on the Mountain' because of the many, many times we did that opera together. He's always in the background when she sings it if you remember that. And, "That's a right sad song, Susannah, don't look as if it would do you much good." So that night I sang that and I sang it to Norman. And it still gets me. So that's the reality of those things. Well, I will give you a little funny example, which is not like that, when we did it in Brussels. My husband had a friend, a correspondent in Europe, and she came with a friend of hers who was a correspondent from Moscow. And he had had some trouble before and was being very careful about what he did and said once out of Russia. But he did come back stage, and he did say to me -- and then he vanished almost immediately and nobody saw him again -- that this was the kind of thing he wished we could show in Moscow because it certainly exists there. Now, we're talking then about the Soviet Union. And the crux of the story hit him right in the middle about that. So, I don't know. It's very interesting. Something about the story itself and the business of revivals and all of that, well, that was a big part of American life. It was when I was growing up. They went on in my hometown a lot. And so I understood that culture, but that's not the point of the story. So I can't answer that question about what makes an American composer. I'm more baffled by it all the time. Wuthering Heights came about in a very nice way. Carlisle and I had become really very fast friends and one day I was working on something or another and I thought, well now Mozart wrote all those concert arias for various ladies who were singing. So I wrote to Carlisle and I said I want a concert aria. I was about to do a second Town Hall recital and I thought it would be fun to have a concert aria. And so he said, sure, he'd do that. And when it came, it was that section out of Wuthering Heights where Cathy says to Nelly "Nelly, have you never had strange dreams?" And then she goes on in the course of this to tell her why she's decided to marry Edgar Linton. But it winds up "...but Heathcliff is more myself than I am and no more like Edgar Linton than fire from ice." And so he delivered my aria to me and I sang it in my recital and there were various opera people at that recital and one of them happened to be John Crosby. But a number of people said "How's the rest of the opera?" And I said "There is no opera, it's just my piece." But Crosby did then commission Wuthering Heights for Santa Fe. And Carlisle has my aria right there in the second act. And that's how that came about. And that's how I got asked to sing it. Carlisle and I never worked at it much. There really hasn't seemed to be a need to. We have understood each other, I think, remarkably well. I don't remember - of course all of this is a long time ago - I don't remember any time when we had any disagreement about a single solitary thing. And in Wuthering Heights there was only one place - I was trying to think about that early this morning - Celia is a very normal lady. Which is the only thing that makes it a little hard sometimes to play somebody that has no neuroses. And there was one little stretch that seemed to me about a third in the music too high. It made her for her character, to me, seem a little on the strident side. And just after reading it though once, I felt that way and I mentioned it to Carlisle and he said "That's true. You know, when I hear it in my head I hear it lower." So he rewrote that and as far as I could tell you in any of those pieces that’s the only thing that ever came up at all. And we have always found absolute unanimity in what we were doing in any of those things together which is marvelous. Well, I think, as should happen to all artists, we grow, we change, and in I hope a lot of respects we get richer all the time in what we have. Now there's a lot of Carlisle I haven't heard now. I haven't heard the recent operas. He sent me a tape of Cold Sassy Tree, so I've heard it, but I've never seen it. Actually, I've only heard Of Mice and Men and never seen it. But I would say that what has happened would seem to me to be a rather rich thing in the development of any major composer - and that is that his vocabulary gets wider. The musical language that he has has become more varied, more interesting - and that happens. I mean it happened to everybody I can think of who has really hung on as a really important composer. And his language has changed a great deal. And it's all been very interesting to me. It's all so sort of Pollyanna for me I'm afraid. We never had anything that I can remember except of sheer delight in doing whatever it was we did. When he would come and be with us and stay with us and we would rehearse at the piano and all, we just found an exhilaration in doing what we did together. And that's a very positive and wonderful thing. Things go much faster that way. But I don't remember, as I say, any time when we had any kind of a disagreement or I really don't like that or couldn’t we do this this way. I seemed to simply fall into his music very easily. I guess I'd put it that way. And apparently, I fell on the right side. Because I don’t recall his fussing at me about anything. But we just had a good time. You found out what an enjoyable guy he is, how easy to get on with. And we just had a wonderful time together. He and my husband and his wife, Kay, we had a lovely, lovely time. And when we made music together it was - I could put it in one word - the most natural thing we did. His music and my singing it, I guess, which is wonderful.

Roles

Role Voice type
Rucker Lattimore Bass-baritone
Love Simpson Soprano
Will Tweedy (Rucker's grandson) Tenor
Lightfoot McClendon (15 years) Soprano
Clayton McAllister (Texas Suitor, 30s) Baritone
Loma Williams (in her 20s; Mary's sister) Mezzo-soprano
Effie Belle Tate (Town busybody in her 60s) Mezzo-soprano
Mary Willis (Widow in her 60s, Will's mother) Soprano
Thelma Predmore (in her 50s) Mezzo-soprano
Lula Soprano
Myrtis Mezzo-soprano
Campbell Williams (Loma's husband, in his 20s) Tenor
Hosie Roach (Lightfoot's half-brother, late teens) Baritone
Mayor Tenor
Sheriff Baritone
Dr. Lomax Bass-baritone
Rufus Tenor
Buford (foreman, carpenter, plumber) Tenor/Baritone
Luther (Hosie's accomplice, early teens) Tenor

References

  1. ^ "Carlisle Floyd: Cold Sassy Tree" Opera Now". Retrieved 28 November 2014.
  2. ^ ""Carlisle Floyd continues his exploration of Southern life in his first major comic opera" U.S. Opera Web". Archived from the original on 21 December 2014. Retrieved 28 November 2014.
  3. ^ Amazon.com page
  4. ^ ""Live Events"". Archived from the original on 13 February 2012. Retrieved 28 November 2014.

External links

This page was last edited on 5 October 2021, at 16:19
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