opera review: The Crucible

[calimac]

Once in a bluer-than-usual moon, we go to the opera. Our taste in operas to attend in person does not run to the standard repertoire - you can see those any time, so we don't. (Irony noted.) Instead, we find rare productions of the great 20th-century lyrical American operas. B's favorite is The Ballad of Baby Doe by Douglas Moore, which we saw in San Francisco a few years ago (and visited the historical sites of in Colorado on another occasion).

This time our own home-town opera company was doing The Crucible by Robert Ward, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1962. Also a favorite, and the tickets were B's birthday present, something to look forward to while I was gone in England.

When Arthur Miller had decided to write up the Salem witch trials, his first thought was an opera libretto, so after his play was successful he was pleased enough to help Ward and his librettist, Bernard Stambler, turn it into an opera. It's as dark and moody a work as you'd expect, with the music existing less for its own sake than as a tool for the drama - which it does very well, particularly in the final act. The play is sometimes criticized for lack of emotional expression. I don't think that criticism would fit the opera. The mere words of the Proctors' final meeting would be telegraphic (the libretto, by necessity, is much shorter than the play): it's the music that conveys the message (that's what Ward got from Wagner), and it does so in a manner of rising and falling intensity that would be familiar to listeners to Puccini.

But despite these conceptual similarities, the music itself is unlike either: it's a clean American pastoral lyricism, darkened by the subject matter, that owes more to Ward's teachers Howard Hanson and Bernard Rogers than to composers like Copland whose harmonies are drier and who prefer crisp intricate rhythms.

The opera company hired locally-noted theater director Timothy Near (Holly's sister), who'd never directed an opera before: she went for a bare, symbolic production using lighting to focus the action. Opera singers are not always noted for acting: the leads here were at least adequate, and while some of the singing seemed to wander off harmonically, most of the performers were very strong and used their voices for great expression of character.

As we all know, Miller was thinking of the McCarthy era, and Ward and Stambler were too. The dynamic of witch-hunts is a little different today, because the emphasis is on those who are Different (foreigners, Muslims, and *gasp* Democrats) than on one's closest and most identical neighbors. But the impulse is still there, and martyrs are still being made.

Comments

Next time say "hi" ...?

[(Anonymous)]

Gee ... come to the pit and say hi if you ever think of it. (Although who knows when we'll do another opera you'll want to hear.)

I'm really enjoying playing this opera. It's new to me. Great stuff. (Exhausting, though.)

Patty (http://www.oboeinsight.com)

[milwaukeesfs.livejournal.com]

Sounds fascinating. I hope one of the Milwaukee area companies might pick it up sometime. Having acted in two different productions of the play (once as John Proctor), I can't say that it lacks emotional expression. A good cast and director can make it quite harrowing.