What, if anything, will music lovers remember a decade from now about American opera in the last year of this century? One possibility is that 1998-99 will be recalled as the season American opera finally came into its own. Among other noteworthy events were these:

• The Metropolitan Opera presented the long-delayed company premiere of Carlisle Floyd’s Susannab (1955), starring the world-renowned American soprano Renée Fleming.
• Fleming and Dawn Upshaw, another much-admired American soprano, released a pair of critically-acclaimed recital albums devoted to scenes and arias from American operas.¹
• New York City Opera revived Floyd’s Of Mice and Men (1970) and Jack Beeson’s Lizzie Borden (1965), and telecast the latter over PBS.
• Milwaukee’s Florentine Opera gave the U.S. premiere of The Picture of Dorian Gray, a first opera by the new-tonalist composer Lowell Liebermann.
• San Francisco Opera opened its season with the world premiere of André Previn’s operatic version of the Tennessee Williams play, A Streetcar Named Desire.
• Gian Carlo Menotti’s The Consul (1950), having previously been unavailable on records for more than three decades, was finally recorded—not once, but twice.

Nor does the season just past appear to be a fluke. In the 1999-2000 season, for example, the Metropolitan Opera will offer the world premiere of John Harbison’s The Great Gatsby and New York City Opera will present Virgil Thomson’s The Mother of Us All (1947), while other premieres and revivals of comparable interest are scheduled to take place around the country.

But is American opera really as vital as it now looks? Thereby hangs a tale.

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American opera is not the same thing as opera in America. By the mid-19th century, operas were being produced more or less regularly in most of the bigger cities in the U.S., and the opening of New York’s Metropolitan Opera House in 1883 gave this country its first permanent company of international stature. But for a long time, opera remained an alien graft, marketed as a luxury item for well-to-do audiences; every important house featured foreign singers and conductors, was run by a foreign director, and performed foreign operas all but exclusively.

Not until the tenure of Giulio Gatti-Casazza, the Met’s director from 1908 to 1935, did the company make a sustained attempt to commission and produce grand operas by American composers. But most of the composers it approached, including such forgotten figures as Richard Hageman, Horatio Parker, John Seymour, and Deems Taylor, were academic conservatives whose music was determinedly pre-modern in style, and none of their efforts entered the company’s repertoire. Only one of the American operas presented by the Met, Howard Hanson’s Merry Mount (1934), proved to be of more than passing interest; even so, and despite an exceptional opening-night success—the cast, which included Lawrence Tibbett, the first world-class male opera singer to have been born and trained in the U.S., took 50 curtain calls—it was never revived by the Met or produced by any other major house, and has yet to be recorded in its entirety.

This is not to say that American composers, or significant American operas, were in short supply, only that they had to look elsewhere. The three most important premieres of the 30’s all took place in nonoperatic venues. Virgil Thomson’s Four Saints in Three Acts (1934) was produced at Connecticut’s Wadsworth Atheneum, one of the oldest art museums in the U.S., and later moved to Broadway for a limited run; George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess (1935) and Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock (1938) both opened on Broadway. Significantly, none of these works was conventional in style or form. Four Saints is a Dada-influenced mystery play set to a nonsense libretto by Gertrude Stein; Porgy and Bess is half-opera, half-musical comedy; and The Cradle Will Rock is a left-wing agitprop musical modeled after the Brecht-Weill The Three-Penny Opera.

These works, though they failed to enter the repertoire of major houses—Porgy and Bess, by far the most successful of the three, was not produced by the Met until 1985, a half-century after its premiere—still had a powerful effect on American composers of the 40’s and after. Having arrived at the logical conclusion that the opera establishment pf their native land was uninterested in modernism, most of all a modernism made in America, they turned their backs on the grand-opera idiom and chose another path.

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That path lay through the American musical, then approaching the peak of its artistic vitality. In shows designed specifically for performance in small-sized Broadway theaters, a number of classical composers in the 40’s began to pay close attention to the musical’s characteristic idioms. Among them was Leonard Bernstein, whose On the Town (book and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green) opened in 1944. There was also Kurt Weill, who emigrated to America in 1935 and subsequently wrote such successful Broadway musicals as Lady in the Dark (1941) and Street Scene (1947). And there was the English composer Benjamin Britten, then living in the U.S., who collaborated with the poet W. H. Auden on Paul Bunyan (1941), an operetta strongly influenced by Gershwin and Cole Porter. Though initially unsuccessful (it has since become popular), Paul Bunyan pointed toward a new approach to American opera, modeled not after such neoromantic costume pieces as Merry Mount but along the modernist lines previously suggested by Blitzstein, Gershwin, and Thomson.

The first American composer to write true operas for theater-sized houses was Gian Carlo Menotti. An Italian emigré who studied at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute, Menotti composed three works—The Medium (1946), The Consul, and The Saint of Bleecker Street (1954)—that were commercially produced on Broadway at a time when American opera houses were closed to operas by American composers.

The Consul, which ran for 269 performances on Broadway and won the Pulitzer Prize, exemplifies Menotti’s approach. Written, like all of his stage works, to the composer’s own English-language libretto, it is a taut, concise melodrama set in “the present” in a totalitarian state somewhere in Europe. The music, often dissonant but always unequivocally tonal, is crisply and sparely scored for a piano-dominated pit orchestra. “I rather like the sparseness,” Menotti has said, “which allows the text to be understood.”

As it happens, many listeners over the years have found the text of The Consul to be more memorable than its score. According to the critic B.H. Haggin, for example, so powerfully does Menotti’s libretto engage the interest that an audience may be tempted to ascribe “to the trashy music the impressive qualities it is being moved by in the dramatic idea.” To this criticism, Menotti has replied that his words and music are all of a piece:

Let anyone read one of my texts divorced from its musical setting to discover the truth of what I say. My operas are either good or bad; but if their librettos seem alive or powerful in performance, then the music must share this distinction.

The truth lies somewhere in between. Like most of Menotti’s operas, The Consul is text-driven, at times resembling a stage play with atmospheric background music rather than an opera; only at key moments, most notably the climactic aria, “To this we’ve come,” does he allow his plain, functional vocal lines to flower into Puccini-like melody. But this is a deliberate choice rather than an incapacity, and in Menotti’s best operas, the results invariably justify themselves in performance. Both The Consul and The Medium are in this respect similar to such “well-made” commercial plays of the 30’s and 40’s as Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes: whatever their seeming inadequacies when considered solely as pure music, they are unfailingly effective on stage.

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Menotti’s commercial success had no immediate effect on the artistic policies of American grand-opera companies, which remained stolidly indifferent to new operas of any kind. Under Rudolf Bing, the Met’s general manager from 1950 to 1972, the company premiered just three new works, all of which were dropped after a season or two. This continuing indifference forced yet another generation of composers to look elsewhere.

Numerous operas by American composers were written in the 50’s and 60’s, and many received their premieres at New York City Opera—a company which, unlike the Met, was committed as a matter of policy to the promotion of American work, and which then occupied much smaller quarters than in its present incarnation as part of the Lincoln Center complex. Unlike Menotti’s operas, these tended to be explicitly American in both tone and theme. Some, like Aaron Copland’s The Tender Land (1954), Floyd’s Susannah, and Douglas Moore’s The Ballad of Baby Doe (1956), were composed in styles deriving in part from American folksong and popular music, while others, including Beeson’s Lizzie Borden (1965) and Floyd’s Of Mice and Men (1970), were cast in a somewhat more modern idiom.

In other ways, though, many of these operas were clearly influenced by Menotti. For one thing, American opera composers of the 50’s and 60’s were just as firmly committed as Menotti to the language of functional tonality. And for another thing, theirs were text-driven works with “well-made” librettos (Samuel Barber’s Vanessa, premiered by the Met in 1958, actually had a libretto by Menotti himself). Though some were more musically memorable than others, most have proved to be highly effective theater pieces.²

Ironically, this selfsame combination of qualities worked in circular fashion to ensure the continued exclusion of American opera, on the one hand from serious critical attention and on the other hand from the major houses. The work of the 50’s and 60’s composers was savaged by a later generation of critics who regarded tonality as passé—and who also had no use for the aesthetic of accessibility that long dominated modern American classical music. Typical of this point of view is the article on Carlisle Floyd in the New Grove Dictionary of Opera (1992), whose tone of objectivity barely conceals the author’s contempt for Floyd’s tradition-based musical values.

At the same time, a more practical obstacle to the success of these works in the world of grand opera was their deliberately restrained proportions. Most of the American operas that followed The Consul were intended, like it, for performance in small- and medium-sized houses. The orchestras are modest in size, the scenic requirements comfortably naturalistic. They were thus well-suited to the needs of regional companies and college music departments looking for new English-language operas that were not beyond their limited technical and financial means. But they could not be produced without distortion on the greatly expanded scale demanded by, say, the 3,800-seat Metropolitan Opera House.

This circumstance continues to bedevil the major-house careers of operas from those years, as the Met’s recent production of Susannah made uncomfortably clear. Floyd’s homespun tale of sexual temptation in a Tennessee mountain village is simply too small in visual and aural scale for the Met’s mammoth stage (a problem Susannah shares with numerous other works, including most of Mozart’s operas). Moreover, the orchestra frequently swamped the singers—not as a result of any musical miscalculation on the composer’s part but because his score was being played by an ensemble big enough to register in so large a house.

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Not until the rise of minimalism, with its simplistic and large-scale musical gestures, did a new generation of American composers emerge who were capable of writing musically accessible operas suitable for production in large houses. Such works as Philip Glass’s Akhnaten (1985) and John Adams’s Nixon in China (1988), both of which emphasize broad-brush pageantry over detailed drama, were quickly taken up by companies around the world. Although they proved musically too limited to stand up to repeated viewings, their short-term success had the same galvanizing effect on younger composers as did Menotti’s earlier success on Broadway. But now there was a difference: American opera had become fashionable, and American houses started looking for accessible new works to produce.

Starting with the Met’s production of John Corigliano’s The Ghosts of Versailles (1991), the 90’s have seen a considerable number of high-profile premieres, including A Streetcar Named Desire, Adams’s The Death of Klinghoffer, Anthony Davis’s Amis-tad, Tobias Picker’s Emmeline, Conrad Susa’s The Dangerous Liaisons, and Stewart Wallace’s Harvey Milk. Many of these operas have a semi-documentary feel reminiscent of such left-wing theater pieces of the 30’s as The Cradle Will Rock or the WPA’s Federal Theater Project productions, and most of them also pay scrupulous homage to the similar political and cultural pieties of the present day. But to date, only one, Lowell Liebermann’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, has been both musically distinguished and dramatically effective.

Significantly, Liebermann’s adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s novel, though compact in scale and modern in the tradition-based manner of the new tonalists, has far more in common with the grandly rhetorical style of 19th-century European opera than the more intimate approach of Menotti and his followers. In this respect, Dorian Gray constitutes a break with recent American operatic practice—but one that, unlike minimalist opera, may prove in the long run to be artistically fruitful.

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What, then, is the future of American opera? One safe bet is that such “well-made” older works as The Consul, Of Mice and Men, and Lizzie Borden will continue to make their way into the repertories of mid-sized opera companies (as well as onto compact disc). In that setting, their dramatic impact and superb craftsmanship can be properly appreciated, and their popularity will no doubt inspire younger classical composers to write in a similar vein.

But no less significant is the recent emergence of a group of New York-based singers and composers seeking to revitalize the musical-comedy idiom, stagnant since the 70’s. The singers, foremost among them the extraordinarily gifted soprano Audra McDonald, are classically trained vocalists who have chosen to go into musical theater instead of opera. The composers, among them Adam Guettel (a grandson of Richard Rodgers, the composer of such classic 1940’s musicals as Pal Joey and Oklahoma!), Michael John LaChiusa, and Jason Robert Brown, have all been influenced by Stephen Sondheim, whose “serious” musicals are themselves better suited to small- and medium-sized opera houses than to Broadway. Whether these composers will ultimately gravitate toward opera remains to be seen, but it is worth noting that Guettel’s Floyd Collins, first produced Off Broadway in 1996, will be revived next season by Houston Grand Opera, a dramatically adventurous company whose repertoire also includes Sondheim’s A Little Night Music.

This leaves the Met, the San Francisco Opera, and Chicago’s Lyric Opera, whose outsized auditoriums make it difficult to produce small-scale operas and musical comedies effectively. In the short run, the temptation will remain strong to opt for second-rate but easily marketed “brand-name” operatic packages like Previn’s A Streetcar Named Desire. The Met’s decision to mark the millennium by commissioning an operatic version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby suggests that it is unlikely to resist this temptation.³

In time, as the artistic and popular success of The Picture of Dorian Gray suggests, the new tonalists may develop a modern grand-opera style that is as dramatically potent—and, perhaps, as characteristically American in tone and subject matter—as the “well-made” operas of the 50’s and 60’s. But until that happens, it seems likely that the major houses that continue to dominate opera in America will have little or no effect on the future of American opera.

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American Opera on CD: A Select Discography

While a number of key American operas—including Lizzie Borden, Of Mice and Men, and The Picture of Dorian Gray—have yet to appear on CD, many of the works mentioned above can be heard, in part or whole, in good-quality commercial recordings. The following list proceeds in chronological order according to date of premiere:

1934: An off-the-air recording of the Metropolitan Opera premiere of Howard Hanson’s Merry Mount has been transferred to CD by Naxos Historical, but is not for sale in the U.S. due to copyright restrictions. Shortly before opening night, Lawrence Tibbett made a boldly sung commercial recording for Victor of the aria “Oh, ’tis an earth defiled” (Nimbus Prima Voce NI 7881).

1934: Virgil Thomson’s Four Saints in Three Acts was later recorded in an abridged version, sung by an ensemble conducted by the composer and drawn in large part from the cast of the original production. This famous 1947 recording has been reissued (RCA 09026-68163-2).

1935: Leontyne Price and William Warfield, who sang together in numerous stage performances of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, recorded extended excerpts in 1963, and this historically important album has just been reissued in much-improved, digitally remastered sound (RCA 09026-63312-2).

1938: The rare original-cast 78’s of Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock, featuring Howard Da Silva as Larry Foreman and accompanied by the composer at the piano, have been transferred to CD as part of a two-disc set of early recordings of Blitzstein’s music (Pearl GEMS 0009, two CD’s).

1950: Decca’s original-cast album of Gian Carlo Menotti’s The Consul, conducted by Thomas Schippers and starring Patricia Neway, has been out of print since the early 60’s, but a fine live recording, incisively conducted by Richard Hick-ox, was made at the 1998 Spoleto Festival and has just been released (Chandos CHAN 9706, two CD’s).

1954: Aaron Copland’s own 1965 recording of scenes and arias from The Tender Land has never been reissued in any format, but the complete opera is available on CD in an adequate studio recording conducted by Philip Brunelle and based on a 1989 concert performance by the Plymouth Music Group of Minnesota (EMI Classics 59297, two CD’s).

1955: Susannah, Carlisle Floyd’s first and most successful opera, is now available in a recording by the Lyon Opera Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Kent Nagano and featuring Cheryl Studer, Jerry Hadley, and Samuel Ramey, the last two of whom also starred in the Metropolitan Opera’s recent production (Virgin Classics CDCB 45039, two CD’s).

1956: The original-cast recording of New York City Opera’s production of Douglas Moore’s The Ballad of Baby Doe, with a young Beverly Sills singing the title role, has just been reissued on CD for the first time (DGG 289 465 148-2, two CD’s).

1958: The Metropolitan Opera’s premiere production of Samuel Barber’s Vanessa, conducted by Dimitri Mitropoulos and starring Eleanor Steber, Rosalind Elias, Regina Resnik, Nicolai Gedda, and Giorgio Tozzi, was recorded in the studio shortly after the opera’s first performances (RCA 7899-2-RG, two CD’s).

1996: Adam Guettel’s Floyd Collins has been recorded by the cast of the original New York production (Nonesuch 79434-2).

In addition, Renée Fleming and Dawn Upshaw have recently issued wide-ranging anthologies of excerpts from American operas. Fleming’s I Want Magic!: American Opera Arias contains arias from The Ballad of Baby Doe, Porgy and Bess, A Streetcar Named Desire, Susannah, Vanessa, and Menotti’s The Medium, accompanied by James Levine and the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra (London 289 460 567-2LH). Upshaw’s The World So Wide contains arias from The Ballad of Baby Doe, Susannah, The Tender Land, John Adams’s Nixon in China, and Kurt Weill’s Street Scene, accompanied by David Zinman and the Orchestra of St. Luke’s (Nonesuch 79458-2). Also of interest is Audra McDonald’s Way Back to Paradise, which contains theater songs by Guettel, Jason Robert Brown, and Michael John LaChiusa (Nonesuch 79482-2).

All of these CD’s can be purchased on line through COMMENTARY’s website:

www.commentarymagazine.com

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¹ Further information about these CDs, along with recordings of other operas mentioned in this piece, can be found in the accompanying discography.

² Interestingly, Copland’s The Tender Land, by far the most musically impressive of these works, has had the least success with audiences, in large part because of its dramatically static libretto—proof that a good score alone is not enough to make an opera work.

³ For a discussion of Streetcar and similar works, see my “Brand-Name Opera” in the November 1998 COMMENTARY.

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