NOTES ON OUR TOWN AND NED ROREM
Skylark Opera is proud to be able to present the Upper Midwest premiere of Our Town, which is also the first professional production in the entire Midwest. It is a lovely and powerful work. It's not about spectacle; it's about people---which makes it a good "fit" for Skylark Opera which is dedicated to intimacy and small performing spaces.
Our Town, the play, by Thornton Wilder is the quintessentially American play, considered by many to be THE greatest American play. It is a play about life, love and death in the mythical small town of Grover's Corners, New Hampshire at the turn of the 20th century. The play premiered in February 1938--70 years ago this year. It won the Pulitzer Prize for drama.
The staging was radical for its time, with minimal sets and props and much left to the observer's imagination. Also innovative was the character of The Stage Manager - he speaks directly to the audience and acts as a guide to Grover's Corners. This way of inviting the audience in as if they were actually visiting the action on stage breaks "the fourth wall".
Composers were immediately attracted by Our Town's operatic potential. Over the years, a number of distinguished composers sought Wilder's permission to write an opera based on it, including Copland and Bernstein. Wilder turned them all down. Thornton Wilder died in 1975. His nephew, Tappan Wilder, became his literary executor. In 2001, poet and Wilder scholar J.D. McClatchy approached Tappan Wilder and convinced him to allow McClatchy to write a libretto for an opera of Our Town. McClatchy persuaded composer Ned Rorem to write the music. Rorem wanted $250,000--enough for him to live for 3 years while composing. This was too much of an investment for one opera company. (Opera is expensive to produce, so major investment in a commission can be overwhelming.) A consortium of opera companies and universities joined together to take advantage of the opportunity to have this opera created. Indiana University took the lead in forming the consortium. Other partners were: A.J. Fletcher School of Music in NC, Festival Opera of Walnut Creek, CA, Lake George Opera in NY state, Aspen Opera Theater in CO, and Opera Boston. The world premiere was in February 2006 at Indiana University. The new work received almost universal acclaim.
Rorem is widely recognized as the modern master of the art song, with more than 500 to his credit. He was born in Richmond, Indiana in 1923 and grew up in Chicago. By the time he was 10, his piano teacher had introduced him to the music of Debussy and Ravel, which he claims "changed my life forever." After attending Northwestern, Curtis Institute and Juilliard, he got a job as composer Virgil Thomson's copyist for twenty dollars a week and lessons in orchestration.
Rorem has almost too many honors to count, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his suite Air Music, a Fulbright Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the ASCAP Lifetime Achievement Award.
Surprisingly, despite his extensive writing for the human voice, Our Town is only his second full-length opera, the first being Miss Julie, based on the Strindberg play, which he wrote in 1965.
Now to Our Town: the opera, like the play is divided into three acts: Daily Life, Love, and Marriage and Death. The themes are as huge as it gets: that the infinite is contained in the mundane and the mundane in the infinite, that life is fleeting, and that human beings are so distracted by the minutiae of daily life that they don't appreciate its everyday wonders until it's too late. These themes are more powerful than ever today---when human contact has to compete with the Internet, text-messaging, 500 TV channels and the 24-hour news cycle. Our Town is set in Grover's Corners, New Hampshire at the turn of the 20th century. A review of a recent revival of the play in New York called Grover's Corners a New England version of Lake Woebegon, where the women are strong, the men are good-looking and the children above-average. The universal themes of the play and opera are explored through a simple love story between two next-door neighbors: Emily Webb, the studious daughter of the town's newspaper editor and George Gibbs, the baseball-loving son of the local doctor.
The music of Our Town is basically tonal, with some dissonance. At times, it's reminiscent of Copland. Rorem also uses hymns: O God, Our Help in Ages Past, Love Divine, All Loves Excelling and Blest Be the Tie that Binds. The harmonies and tunes are untraditional, somewhat in the manner of Charles Ives.
Act I: we meet the characters and see them go about their daily routines: stringing beans, walking home from school, giving a son a lecture for neglecting his chores, choir practice, trying to concentrate on homework on a beautiful moonlit night.
The opera opens with a repetition of evocative, dissonant chords. These chords hint at the serious subject matter to come. They're a little unsettling because they don't resolve. The first thing we see is a funeral---we don't know whose. After that, there's the introduction of a lyrical, folk-like tune that might be called the "bucolic Grover's Corners theme". Then the Stage Manager starts to tell us about the new day that is dawning.
At the end of the act, under a beautiful full moon, George and Emily talk to each other from their bedroom windows. Emily tells George about a letter her friend received from her minister, with a long, long address that expresses Wilder's concept that the infinite surrounds human life on Earth. In some gorgeous orchestral writing, Rorem echoes the same dissonant chords we heard at the beginning of the opera, then another recurring theme that might be "the Infinity theme".
Act II takes place on George and Emily's wedding day, three years later. Emily's father gives George some advice on the morning of the wedding. Later, at the church, George and his mother and Emily and her father wait for the ceremony to begin. Both the young people express their serious cold feet in an ensemble, where George utters a classic rallying cry for "commitment-phobic" males everywhere: "All I want to do is be a fella."
Of course, they go through with the marriage, and the act ends happily with Emily and George as a new husband and wife.
In Act III, another nine years have passed. In this act, the playwright and librettist pull us back to view life in Grover's Corners from the viewpoint of the dead. And this shift in viewpoint is mirrored by a change in Rorem's musical language, which becomes much more operatic and emotional. The Stage Manager takes us to the Grover's Corners cemetery on a hill outside of town. We see some of the characters we met in earlier acts, including Mrs. Gibbs, George's mother. A funeral is in progress---for Emily, who has died in childbirth. She joins the dead, but she still feels like one of the living. She asks whether she can go back and relive a day. Against the strong advice of the dead, she chooses her 13th birthday and returns as both observer and participant. Before long, she begs to be returned to her grave; it is too excruciating to see the blindness of her family, too caught up in their everyday concerns to appreciate the miraculous nature of life. Before returning to the cemetery, she sings the opera's only real aria, bidding a heartbreaking farewell to life.
At the very end of the opera, we hear the bucolic Grover's Corners theme again. It's night and most of the town is asleep. The Stage Manager tells the audience to get some rest, too, and bids us good night. The opera ends with an echo of those same mysterious chords which began it.
AMS 2008
Skylark thanks its many patrons who have generously made supporting donations and also the organizations who have provided grants, including the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Target Foundation, the Victor Herbert Foundation and the Twin Cities Opera Guild.
