Chelsea Basler
Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah seems like the perfect opera for the #MeToo movement. Loosely based on the biblical story of Susanna and the Elders, the opera shines a spotlight on such hot-button topics as sexual harassment, religious hypocrisy and the dangers of groupthink.
Nashville Opera will present Floyd’s dark, powerful and emotionally riveting work Friday through Sunday at TPAC’s Polk Theater. Given the contemporary relevance of this work’s many themes, one may wonder whether the company’s theatrical director John Hoomes has a political message to impart to the community — perhaps the timing of this production is more than just serendipity.
“I watched with fascination as events involving the #MeToo movement unfolded over the past year,” Hoomes tells the Scene. “But I did not program Susannah because of its current political or social relevance. We plan our seasons years in advance, so there’s no way to foresee hot topics or trends. Susannah simply fell in the rotation for this year.”
Not that Hoomes needs a specific reason to stage Susannah. Premiered in the mid-1950s at Florida State University, where the composer was then on the piano faculty, Susannah is widely regarded, along with Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, as one of the greatest operas composed by an American. The opera is chock-full of hit songs, folksy arias like “Ain’t It a Pretty Night” and “The Trees on the Mountains.” And like Gershwin’s Porgy, Floyd’s opera is thoroughly American, making it a remarkably relatable work.
Politically speaking, Susannah was conceived in an age that makes the polarization of the Trump era seem tame. Floyd began teaching at Florida State during the height of Cold War hysteria in the early 1950s. Somehow, the Russians had gotten the bomb, and the Chinese had gone communist. This had obviously been an inside job, argued Wisconsin senator and scaremonger extraordinaire Joseph McCarthy, who insisted that homegrown spies were working in the deep state, Hollywood and crazy-left-wing-liberal academia to undermine American security and values.
Prior to the McCarthy era, one of the biggest hurdles for Floyd was the fiendishly difficult piano passagework in Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit. But the national paranoia soon invaded Tallahassee. “We faculty had to sign a pledge of loyalty or lose our jobs,” Floyd recalled in an interview published in The New York Times in 1999.
Artists soon began responding to the Red Scare hysteria with works of protest. In 1953, playwright Arthur Miller published The Crucible, which used the Salem witch trials of the 1690s as a metaphor for McCarthyism. Two years later, Floyd came out with Susannah.
Floyd grew up the son of a Methodist minister in rural South Carolina, and he decided to relocate his operatic version of Susanna and the Elders to an isolated Tennessee mountain community in modern times. In response to the McCarthy madness, there would be no happy ending in Floyd’s setting — no Daniel coming to Susanna’s rescue.
Instead, Floyd invents a new male protagonist, an itinerant preacher with the delightfully evocative name Olin Blitch. The preacher arrives in town and observes the tension between the residents and a young woman named Susannah. Church elders had recently observed her bathing naked in a creek, and they concealed their lust with lies about her promiscuity. Blitch attempts to intervene, but his misguided and immoral actions ultimately lead to Susannah’s ostracism and his own demise.
In composing Susannah, Floyd was thinking about the relationship between the individual and the community. But like any complex, layered work, Susannah can be interpreted in multiple ways. For Chelsea Basler, the soprano singing the title role with Nashville Opera, Susannah is very much about the plight of women in contemporary society.
“What Susannah goes through is a dramatized version of what a lot of women go through,” Basler writes in an email to the Scene. “It’s in your face, and you can’t hide from it or say it didn’t (or doesn’t) happen.”
Interestingly, Basler notes that what her character goes through over the course of the opera’s two hours and 10 minutes also takes a considerable toll on her. “That’s the biggest challenge,” she writes. “It’s a very emotional role, and it’s incredibly difficult to allow myself to fall into her darkness and sadness over and over again.”
But the role has ample rewards in the form of its drop-dead-gorgeous music. The opera’s unforgettably beautiful arias attracted no less a diva than Renée Fleming, who introduced the role to the Metropolitan Opera’s audience in the 1990s. Dean Williamson, who’s conducting the Nashville Opera Orchestra in this weekend’s production, insists that the hit songs are just part of what makes this opera great.
“The orchestra writing is wonderfully Puccini-esque, and the vocal writing is remarkably conversational,” says Williamson. “The scenes are tight and well-put-together, so you almost feel like you’re watching a movie. It’s a true masterpiece.”
