Carlisle Floyd's Wuthering Heights in Alaska

Fourteen years after the last performances it seems that Carlisle Floyd's Wuthering Heights opera will return to the stages. We were expecting some revival because 2006 marks Mr Floyd's 80th anniversary, but we will have to wait until next year and... well, go to Alaska. Literally.

On the left hand picture: Joan Gibbons and Jeff Mattsey at the Boston Lyric Opera, March 1993. Photo by Richard Feldman. Source.

We read on the KTVA website:

A new opera company in Interior Alaska plans to stage its first performance next spring. Opera Fairbanks officials say their goal is to provide educational, promotional and performance opportunities to Alaskans. The group expects to cast productions with performers from around the state in addition to incorporating a range of professionals in each production.

Performances will begin at Pioneer Park in next spring with the premiere season spanning 2007-to-2008. The group anticipates that each season will include a main stage production, a concert opera, and a children's opera. One of the company's first major productions will be "Wuthering Heights" by American composer Carlisle Floyd.

More details about the company are revealed here.

This is probably a good time to quote Mr Floyd himself talking about his opera in the 2002 September issue of USOperaWeb:

Floyd’s operatic version premiered in Santa Fe on July 16, 1958, with Robert Trehy (Heathcliff), Phyllis Curtin (Cathy), Regina Sarfaty (Nellie) and Loren Driscoll (Edgar). The New York City Opera presented it next in its all-American 1959 spring season, again with Ms. Curtin who was joined by company stars John Reardon (Heathcliff), Patricia Neway (Nellie) and Frank Porretta (Edgar); Julius Rudel conducted. Productions followed within a year at Chautauqua Opera and Florida State University and then the opera dropped out of sight.

We asked Mr. Floyd how Wuthering Heights came to be. “This is kind of an interesting story: after Phyllis did Susannah, she asked me to do a piece for a Town Hall recital. I wrote what we referred to as a concert aria, like the Mozart concert arias that are not part of any opera. An actress friend of mine in college had told me about this monologue of Cathy’s that actresses used for an audition piece. It begins, ‘do you ever dream strange dreams…,’ and in it Cathy confides to her nurse, Nellie, of her love for Heathcliff and her great stress over her impending marriage to Edgar. I composed the concert aria verbatim from the Brontë novel. I was not at Phyllis’s recital but apparently it was very successful, so much so that some opera impresarios, among them Kurt Herbert Adler of San Francisco, came backstage and wanted to know about the rest of the opera. Phyllis told them there was no opera, that this aria was it. After that, there began to build some momentum for doing a full operatic version of Wuthering Heights which was then furthered by my publisher and agent at that time, Robert Holden at Boosey Hawkes, and John Crosby who had just founded Santa Fe Opera. They offered me a commission for Santa Fe and at first I said no because I thought it was too big an undertaking. But it was Wuthering Heights or nothing. I was encouraged by Phyllis, who was going to sing in it, and there were very pleasant pressures from all sides, so at that point I said, alright. It’s the only opera, by the way, where I’ve had the subject matter dictated to me.

“From the very beginning, I set out to create an atmosphere of gloom and foreboding in the music – after all it’s a very gothic novel. Obviously it was not an opera that permitted any ‘Americanisms.’ But I welcomed that; after Susannah, I was getting offered a lot of American scripts and I didn’t want to get completely locked into that.

“The opera is very rarely done now. The last production I know of was with the Boston Lyric Opera back in 1993. It was interesting to get back to it – I hadn’t heard it for probably 25 years or more – and to find that it still works. It’s a kind of a transitional piece between Susannah and the operas that came later. It gave me a chance to write a through-composed opera and it’s probably closer to the operas that came later, but there’s still enough of Susannah to recognize that it is mine. But I liked it and I did not remember that it was as lyrical as it was. I think it’s worth doing and Phyllis thinks so too. If I felt that one of my operas did not come off I would certainly say so; but I think it works. Considerable revision was done between Santa Fe and New York; I rewrote the entire third act. I made one short cut in it in ’93 when I did it in Boston which I think made one scene ending more effective, but otherwise I don’t see any reason to tinker with it.”

A (negative) review of the Boston production can be read here.

Categories: Music, Opera, Wuthering_Heights