SUSANNAH BACKGROUND NOTES

THE LESSONS OF SUSANNAH
After half a century, Carlisle Floyd's opera still has much to teach us
By Roger Pines

Susannah has been performed thousands of times over the past seven decades. It reaches out to seemingly every audience, not just with Carlisle Floyd's magnificent yet instantly accessible music, but also with a story that has never lost its relevance.

This was a deeply personal work for Floyd. Although its hymns and folk-like moments were entirely his own, they were very much in the spirit and tradition of music he'd always known. As a child he attended revival meetings, which he remembered as "very terrifying," with an unnerving feeling of "mass coercion" and a sense that "the entire congregation was on my back to go to the altar. I resented the fact of the mob against the individual."

The South Carolina native understood the various "types" who populate Susannah (gossip wives, hypocritical elders, charismatic itinerant preacher). Although a Methodist minister rather than an evangelist, Floyd's father—like the opera's Olin Blitch—did lead a peripatetic existence, continually relocating in one rural town after another. Floyd has commented that "the ladies in the community always had the visiting minister and his family for dinner—each one tried to outdo what the other had done. That's all part of my background." He noted, too, that, as a child of the Depression, he grew up well aware of an "under-educated, lower economic class" demographic that would be central to Susannah.

In late 1953 Floyd, then teaching at Florida State University, began working on Susannah, his first full-length opera (for which he wrote his own libretto.) Genuine inspiration came his way in a devastatingly moving work from 1950, Gian Carlo Menotti's The Consul.

Experiencing that opera onstage helped Floyd envision an art form that, at its best, was anchored by unimpeded theatrical momentum—what he thereafter referred to as "musical drama."

At Aspen in 1954, Floyd played through Susannah's arias for soprano Phyllis Curtin. Hailing from small-town West Virginia, she connected immediately with both the music and the character. When baritone Mack Harrell heard portions of the score, he, too, was enthusiastic. Delighted that these singers were interested, Floyd's dean at FSU began planning Susannah's first production, presented in Tallahassee on February 24, 1955. The following year the work triumphed at New York City Opera, eventually receiving the New York Music Critics Circle Award as the best new opera of the 1956. Susannah also represented America at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair. Many critics, then as now, termed it a "folk opera," which always frustrated Curtin. She often commented that "it's not a folk opera, any more than Cavalleria rusticana is a folk opera, or Peter Grimes is a folk opera." 

Floyd found his dramatic source in the Apocrypha's story of "Susanna and the Elders," which he freely updated to backwoods 1950s Tennessee. The Apocryphal heroine is publicly exonerated while the opera's is not, although in the end Floyd's Susannah does remain defiant even when the villagers threaten to force her to leave New Hope Valley.

Susannah is regarded by her exceedingly self-righteous community as what, in today's parlance, we might describe simply as "other" (early in the opera, one of the local gossips declares, "That pretty a face must hide some evil"). The villagers have no interest in understanding her as a human being, given how different she is from everyone around her.

We have little sense of what Susannah's family life was like growing up (other than the fact that her father used to sing her the "Jaybird Song"). Her brother Sam doesn't have much time for her, since he's generally either hunting or drunk. The two are used to a particularly rustic life, living in their isolated cabin.

Early in the opera, Susannah seems lively and sweet-natured. We see the delight with which she dances with all the men, and the affection coloring her relationships with Little Bat and Sam. At the same time, she has a sense of adventure and is eager to see what lies "out there beyond them mountains." She's a vibrantly appealing, earthy young woman but with an innocence about her, evident in her lighthearted singing we hear offstage as she's bathing naked in the mountain stream.

The beginning of Susannah's disillusionment occurs in the dismaying moment of her rejection by the villagers. Despite her generous gift of freshly picked peas, she's completely shunned. From then on, her joy in life quickly deteriorates, due to the shame to which she's subjected in the revival scene, as well as her profound loneliness and melancholy. She admits to Blitch that she doesn't know what it would be like to be happy again. Once her seduces her, she understandably becomes bitter (Blitch asks for her forgiveness and she replies, "Forgive? I forget what that word means"). When she reveals what Blitch has done to her, Sam shoots him and flees New Hope Valley, the comparatively carefree life Susannah had known is ruined. In the final scene, her near-violent response to the villagers constitutes, in effect, a courageous assertion of her right to remain in the valley.

Blitch is perhaps an even more challenging role. He embodies a religious hypocrisy that is very much alive in our own time. Although sexual abuse within the church wasn't uncommon during the period of Susannah's composition, the problem has been much more widely reported in recent decades. We can all recall news accounts of clergymen (usually deeply trusted by their communities) revealed as sexual predators. It was horrifying to hear from NBC News a few years ago that "nearly 1,700 priests and other clergy members that the Roman Catholic Church considers credibly accused of child sexual abuse are living under the radar with little to no oversight from religious authorities or law enforcement."

Just before the weary, emotionally exhausted Susannah yields to Blitch's advances, the opera's most unsettling moment occurs: a skillful singing actor can make something utterly chilling of the preacher's words: "Will your brother be home tonight?....Let's go inside." Floyd subsequently gives Blitch a remorseful, prayer-like monologue, and the character does attempt (unsuccessfully) to persuade the villagers to forgive Susannah, but the composer doesn't manage to gain the audience's sympathy for this troubled, love-starved man.

Anyone experiencing a performance of this opera should bear in mind that the televised McCarthy hearings were mesmerizing Americans in 1954, as Floyd was completing Susannah. He later explained that although he didn't consciously create a parallel between the opera and the atmosphere of suspicion that McCarthyism had promoted nationwide, "I lived through the terrors. At Florida State, an accusation was tantamount to guilt. We faculty had to sign a pledge of loyalty or lose our jobs. It affected me and informed me emotionally. And there it is in the opera. But I can't say I put it there." 

In the current political climate, it's impossible to avoid extrapolating New Hope Valley's false accusation of Susannah into today's ever-increasing fear of "other-ness." There's an encroaching feeling that we're being watched, that what we write and what we say could be used against us, even that our lives and livelihoods could one day be damaged irreparably. The story of Susannah may be built on a small scale, but half a century after its premiere, its impact remains more vivid and powerful than ever. 

ROGER PINES is a contributing writer to Opera magazine (U.K.), programs of opera companies internationally, and major recording labels. Former dramaturg of Lyric Opera of Chicago and currently a faculty member of Northwestern University's Bienen School of Music, Pines has also been a panelist on the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts' "Opera Quiz" since 2006.