SUSANNAH BACKGROUND NOTES

By Martha Collins, Stage Director & Director of Education

Carlisle Floyd crafted one of the most enduring and frequently performed American operas with his masterpiece, Susannah. In this year, the centenary of his birth, it is fitting to bring this opera back to Florida, the state where it premiered 1955 when Floyd was a young professor at Florida State University.

Written during the McCarthy era, Susannah is loosely based on the biblical tale from the Apocrypha of "Susannah and the Elders", but Floyd puts it into an updated American context; Susannah is a young and innocent woman of humble origins in a small mountain town in Tennessee who is falsely targeted as a sinner. The resulting raw, intense work explores themes of religious hypocrisy, isolation, and loss of innocence.

Floyd wrote both the music and the libretto, bringing to life a world he knew intimately from his youth. His father was a Methodist minister and Floyd rebelled against what he felt was religion's oppressive control. "I hated revival meetings as a child.... They were frightening. It was a mass coercion of people. It's fascism; it's very offensive and angering; it's the imposing of one's moral code on others."

When asked if his opera intentionally addressed McCarthyism Floyd said: "It was not something I set out to do, but I felt that if a strong moral message came through the drama, then all the better. I lived through that period, which was the darkest period that I've ever lived through in my life. A lot of false accusations were made, and that really enraged me. People that I knew were evicted from the university, even friends. At Florida State an accusation was tantamount to guilt. We faculty had to sign a pledge of loyalty or lose our jobs."

In creating the opera, Floyd says he drew inspiration from a creative writing teacher in college who advised to "write what you know". The libretto, which he completed in ten days, is a taut, intense drama that would stand on its own as a theater piece. The story and characters are all brought to life in the natural dialect and speech rhythms of the American south. To this he added music of exceptional beauty and variety. His score is renowned for its melodic accessibility and directness, blending American folk melodies, traditional folk hymns and powerful operatic drama which perfectly depicts the moods and tension of this Tennessee setting.

His belief in the work gave him the confidence to approach the esteemed soprano Phyllis Curtin to consider taking on the role of Susannah for the premiere. It only took him playing Susannah's two arias for her at the piano to convince her of the worthiness of the opera. While the premiere took place at Florida State University, it was her backing that persuaded New York City Opera to program the work for the next year. "I love the opera and am convinced that it is a really great work."

Carlisle Floyd described his compositional style in Susannah as an effort to create an accessible American opera, combining traditional classical forms with American vernacular music to "redress the balance" of drama and music. His hope was that the opera would be widely accessible: "I felt that there was a large audience in this country who had never gone inside an opera house... I wanted to write an opera that would seem comfortable for that audience, if we could get them inside." 

The longevity and popularity of this American work attests that he was successful. Though a young and relatively inexperienced composer when writing Susannah, with its premiere he burst on the scene to immediate success. The opera was awarded the New York Music Critics Circle Award for Best New Opera in 1956 and was chosen to represent American Music and culture at the World's Fair in Brussels in 1958. 

Susannah continues to be one of the most powerful and frequently performed American operas which seems as relevant today as it was during the McCarthy era in which it was written.