Peabody Opera Workshop presents
American Women
a potpourri of scenes from American opera
JoAnn Kulesza, music director
Roger Brunyate, Kevin Clark, Elizabeth Cooper, Heather Craw, Caitlin Donovan, Maria Kate Fleming, Bonnie Lander, stage directors
Miriam A. Friedberg Concert Hall
Tuesday, April 3, 2007, at 7:30 PM
Admission Free
| Current season calendar | Peabody Opera home |
For its final opera potpourri of the 2006–07 season, the Peabody Opera Department presents works written in America, from the nineteen-fifties to the present day. All feature women as their major characters — not necessarily American women, but women viewed from a particularly American perspective. The eight selections will be presented in the order in which they were composed. Six of the eight scenes will be staged by graduate student directors, members of a seminar led by Roger Brunyate.
Gian-Carlo Menotti: The Saint of Bleecker Street (1954). Menotti’s three-act music drama is set in New York’s Little Italy. Annina, the title character, is devout but sickly. The first scene of the opera had shown her in the grip of a religious vision, in which she imagines being present at the Crucifixion; it ends with the bleeding stigmata appearing on her hands. The present scene, by contrast, shows Annina in more normal circumstances, surrounded by friends, negihbors, and their children.
Robert Ward: The Crucible (1961). Ward’s operatic setting of the Arthur Miller play, written on commission for the New York City Opera, won him the Pulitzer prize. Its subject, the Salem witch-hunts in the seventeenth-century, was a parallel to the political persecution of the McCarthy era. The principal accusers are a group of hysterical girls led by Abigail Williams, who is now threatening the household of her former master, John Proctor. Proctor meets Abigail by her request at night, but he is weakened by having had a previous affair with Abigail, and is powerless to stop her as she threatens his wife.
Conrad Susa: Transformations (1973). Pulitzer prize-winning poet Anne Sexton published Transformations in 1971. It is a retelling of several Grimm fairytales, whose jazzy flippancy covers the very real traumas in Sexton’s life that eventually drove her to suicide four years later. Susa collaborated with the poet in bringing nine of the stories to the stage. The Rapunzel scene, part of which we shall be performing in our program, treats the relationship between the old witch and the imprisoned girl with surprising sympathy, as a memorial to the teenage Anne’s own emotional relationship with a beloved aunt.
Robert Ward: Roman Fever (1993). Ward chose Edith Wharton’s short story about two American women and their daughters in Rome partly in response to librettist Roger Brunyate’s suggestion that a short all-female opera might be of particular value for collegiate performance. Wharton’s story contains only the characters of the rich American widows who recall their previous stay in Rome some twenty years before; the two daughters, mentioned in the story but not seen, were added by Brunyate and Ward to provide present-tense parallels which reawaken old rivalries between the former friends.
André Previn: A Streetcar Named Desire (1998). Previn’s musical setting, commissioned by the San Francisco Opera, closely follows the 1947 Tennessee Williams play. Blanche Dubois arrives in New Orleans to stay with her sister Stella. Emotionally devastated by the loss of other members of her family, their ancestral home at Bellerive, and her own job as a school teacher, and barely holding herself together with drink and dreams, she is horrified to see the two-room apartment where Stella lives with her trucker husband Stanley Kowalksi.
Nicholas Maw: Sophie’s Choice (2002). English composer Nicholas Maw (who teaches on the faculty at Peabody) chose William Styron’s 1979 novel as the basis for an opera to fulfil a major commission from the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. The opera premieres in 2002, in a performance conducted by Simon Rattle and staged by Trevor Nunn. Sophie is a Polish Catholic immigrant who comes to Brooklyn after World War II. Gradually, in a series of flashbacks, Sophie reluctantly reveals her wartime past. Our program presents one of the earliest of these in which Wanda, a college friend, asks Sophie to help the Polish resistance against the German occupation. But Sophie refuses, fearful for the safety of her two children.
Mark Adamo: Lysistrata (2005). This opera, subtitled The Nude Goddess, was premiered by the Houston Grand Opera in 2005. Starting from Aristophanes’ play about the Athenian women who go on a sex strike to put an end to the Peleponnesian War, Adamo (who wrote his own libretto) has extended the plot, added new characters, and modernized many elements. Now the war between the sexes becomes the main subject, and the actual fighting, while senselessly tragic, is seen as an outcome of basic male nature. Our program will include two scenes from this work, by kind permission of the composer. In the opening (following a mock-baroque prelude involving three goddesses), a group of women protest the war that has deprived them of their menfolk. Then, in a scene towards the end of the opera, all the women pay honor to Lysia, who has led them in their quest for peace, little knowing that she has been following her own erotic agenda, and feels unworthy to receive their tribute.
The Saint of Bleecker Street | ||
| Assunta | Christine Dominguez | |
| Carmela | Kate Fay | |
| Annina | Elizabeth Dow | |
| Maria Corona | Erin Dias | |
| Stage Director | Caitlin Donovan | |
The Crucible | ||
| Abigain WIlliams | Caitlin Fischer | |
| John Proctor | Julian Ledford | |
| Stage Director | Kevin Clark | |
Transformations | ||
| Jihee Kim | ||
| Sara Woodward | ||
| Natasha Sachs | ||
| Stage Director | Elizabeth Cooper | |
Roman Fever | ||
| Alida Slade | Elizabeth Cooper | |
| Jenny Slade | Rebecca Bell | |
| Barbara Ansley | Mehgan Davis | |
| Grace Ansley | Laura Koznarek | |
| Waiter | Jason Buckwalter | |
| Stage Director | Heather Craw | |
A Streetcar Named Desire | ||
| Blanche Dubois | Sarah Hoover | |
| Stella Kowalski | Betsy Bates | |
| Stage Director | Maria Kate Fleming | |
Sophie’s Choice | ||
| Wanda | Annie Gill | |
| Sophie | Pamela Stein | |
| Stage Director | Bonnie Lander | |
Lysistrata | ||
| Tisiphone | Sheena Majdan | |
| Alecto | Christine Dominguez | |
| Magaera | Erin Dias | |
| Xanthe | Caitlin Donovan | |
| Myrrhine | Amanda Varrone | |
| Sappho | Madelyn Wanner | |
| Kleonike | Tasha Thomas | |
| Two Geezers | Jason Buckwalter Julian Ledford | |
| All Women of the Company | ||
| Stage Director | Roger Brunyate | |