Susannah’s Historical Background
The decade of the 1950s was a special time in the history of American music. It was a golden era for musical theater and a period when opera and musical theater were moving closer together. Artists sought a truly American operatic style and many creative efforts to achieve this end were generated. The Tender Land by Aaron Copland and The Ballad of Baby Doe by Douglas Moore were written during this period. Other gifted composers of this generation were such luminaries as Samuel Barber, Leonard Bernstein, Robert Ward and Gian-Carlo Menotti.
Carlisle Floyd was just 28 years old in 1955 when his opera Susannah made its debut in Tallahassee, Florida. The following year it won popular and critical acclaim at its New York premiere, garnering the New York Music Critics’ Circle Award. The New York City Opera production traveled to Belgium in 1958 for the Brussels Exposition, establishing Floyd on an international level.
The impetus for Susannah came from a 1953 conversation with a friend at Florida State University who thought an updated version of the Apocryphal Book of Susanna would be a worthy subject for an opera. The idea stimulated Floyd’s interest and he decided to undertake the venture. His knowledge of the biblical story of Susanna was rudimentary and he did not actually read the Apocryphal tale in detail until after he wrote his libretto. Floyd thus considers his libretto to be entirely original.
Susannah is consistent with many other operas and stage works of the period in its folkloric quality, lyricism and harmonically conservative music. Some consider it a folk opera, but Floyd identifies it as a musical drama. In his search for authenticity he wrote a plainspoken libretto that resonates with a Southern hill country dialect. The rural setting and parlance was familiar to him from childhood experiences. Much of the opera’s music is based on hymn tunes and folk melodies. The vocal lines are both sung and half-spoken. As Floyd stated, “In my opera there is quite a bit of spoken text, Sprechstimme, and also half-sung lines. When it comes to full singing, I want it to come from the spoken to the fully-sung text as if to say ‘Now do you get the point?’” Additionally, he felt it was essential that the text be idiomatically correct. Floyd’s vocal lines present authentic speech regulated by pitch and rhythm, all contained within a dissonant harmonic and polytonal musical language.
The opera was written during a period called the red scare, a time of public fear and government investigations into perceived Communist infiltration in American government and society. Floyd said, “The McCarthy era did more than anything else to put a cloak of silence over the country in terms of defending a situation. That underlies very much the story in Susannah. The fact that nobody really speaks up or defends her for fear of being accused themselves is all it takes to make a witch hunt.” Floyd’s opera was a reaction to the excesses of the McCarthy era without being overtly political. Floyd is engaged more in revealing the timeless issues of human behavior and the flaw in some human minds that sees evil where none exists. He shows that jealousy has its roots in envy and that baseless accusations, intolerance, and mob rule are the natural consequences of zealotry. As Floyd once said, “Zealotry is one of the most frightening elements in the human mind. It proceeds on the assumption that there’s one right way, and it’s mine. It’s a specter that never really goes away. And it’s pure projection — you project onto others your own guilt or fears.”
Susannah is an opera firmly rooted in American musical tradition and its plot, stage action, characterization, diction, and music are artfully blended. The composer wrote both the libretto and the music and created a highly unified piece of theater. The characters are compelling, the heroine strong and resolute and the underlying themes timeless. The nearly through-composed music is clearly of the 20th century but remains accessible to the opera-going public. Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah is one of the masterpieces of 20th century American opera and has established itself as a classic in the grand opera tradition.
Courtesy of Virginia Opera
