The premiere of Cold Mountain, an opera by composer Jennifer Higdon and librettist Gene Scheer, was unveiled at The Santa Fe Opera Saturday night in a production that built cumulative power through the course of two fully filled acts and ended up touching hearts just like an opera should.
The piece is based on Charles Frazier’s novel of the same name, which won the 1997 National Book Award for Fiction and spent 61 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list as a hardcover and another 33 as a paperback. Some 4 million copies of it now reside on bookshelves, some surely purchased thanks to the film adaptation that was released in 2003. An operatic addition to the “brand” was guaranteed to enjoy built-in media attention and audience goodwill, but it brought with it considerable challenges. Frazier’s novel is far more “narrative” than it is “conversational”; its appeal lies above all in its rolling poetic descriptions, into which the characters are placed with third-person detachment. It is a love story, to be sure, which is a good starting point for an opera. In fact, it is several love stories, all set against the violent background of the Civil War in the hills of North Carolina.
The central thread follows the Confederate deserter Inman as he wends his way back to his beloved Southern belle Ada. But there is also the love that binds Ada to Ruby, the savvy mountain girl who mysteriously appears to help her survive in the isolated backcountry; and the love Ruby (and, by extension, Ada) displays for Ruby’s irresponsible father, Stobrod. The real action, however, attaches to the succession of daunting, violent challenges Inman encounters during his trek. The book is often described as the Odyssey transposed to the Smoky Mountains.
In the novel, these yield a series of episodes that are mostly self-contained, and it required some creativity to mold the material into a libretto that is not just a parade of disparate vignettes. Hats off to Scheer for accomplishing that with a sensitivity that both honors the source and renders it suitable to its new medium. He does this through frequent flashbacks and cross-cutting, never letting the main dramatic question — will Inman and Ada reunite? — get forgotten as Inman makes his way through his trials, miraculously surviving them through his wiles and his inherent nobility of spirit.
On paper, it looks potentially confusing. The tale is populated by many secondary characters who come and go fleetingly, which might lead to overload for an audience trying to follow the narrative. Sometimes entirely separate scenes overlap on the stage, requiring viewers to process information in an unaccustomed way and glue together dissimilar times, places and events. These issues prove not just manageable but downright coherent, thanks in great measure to Leonard Foglia’s cleverly conceived and clearly executed direction. All the action unrolls on an abstract set, designed by Robert Brill, in which massive planks crisscross one another like giant-sized pick-up sticks. It suggests the roof beams of a barn while playing on the idea of intersecting pieces that lies at the heart of the narrative itself. Sections of the set can be rearranged to serve the various episodes without impeding on the unity of the general look, which helps contain the plot.
Brian Nason’s lighting guides eyes to where they need to focus at a given moment, even if that place is the dark confusion of a war-torn forest, and it enhances the activities with appropriate infusions of heat or cold, both physical and emotional. Projections, designed by Elaine J. McCarthy, add to the clarity by displaying captions of time and place on an upper beam — a useful assist to viewers hoping to sort out the chronology of events. Beyond that, the projections provide stunning visual experiences, enveloping the front of the theater in stars or surrounding the action with a blizzard of snow, even making a troop of slaughtered soldiers resemble bandage-wrapped apparitions.
The most remarkable aspect of Higdon’s score is its orchestral writing. Within her voluminous output, her instrumental works have proved generally more impactful than her vocal ones, which are less numerous. One constantly admired her skill as an orchestrator in the course of the evening. She employed essentially traditional opera-pit resources with a fine sense of color, drawing on familiar tropes to telegraph emotional signals (English horn plus muted strings, for example, is shorthand for solid, rural integrity) without overdoing that sort of thing as a film score might. Barber, Copland, Harris and Bernstein all cast their shadows over this piece of overt Americana, although Higdon refracts them through her own more modern prism, usually with a firm tonal foundation that even conservative music lovers will find easy to swallow. The orchestra played with caring attention, its timbral blend and rhythmic precision responding generously to Miguel Harth-Bedoya’s lucid conducting.
Higdon had a fine cast of singers to work with. Baritone Nathan Gunn and mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard made a handsome Inman and Ada. Both have rich voices infused with luster that lends clarity. Leonard got the opera’s finest aria, perhaps the only expanse to really merit that term, a deeply affecting number in the second act (“I feel sorry for you”) where she is left alone with the unconscious Stobrod and sings about how she wishes he could appreciate Ruby as she does, covering two octaves and sculpting her lines with passionate sweep. Gunn did not really benefit from a commensurate passage, instead getting his best material while in dialogue with other characters. He sang with his accustomed naturalness and ease, and he commanded such sympathy that one could not fail to enjoy accompanying him on his journey, harrowing as it was. Emily Fons, also a mezzo-soprano, brought rich tone to the role of Ruby, conveying rough-hewn lustiness without the hee-haw flavor that made Renée Zellweger so annoying in the movie. A terrific part came to tenor Jay Hunter Morris by way of Teague, who shows up dependably to terrorize the mountain folk, ostensibly fulfilling his patriotic duty to execute deserters or people hiding them, but really because he is just a horrible, horrible person. Morris, whose operatic bona fides extend to an impressive string of Siegfrieds at the Metropolitan Opera, was not called on to put his heldentenor capacities to full use. Instead, he crafted a compelling character role full of menace — one might say, an actor’s interpretation supported by a far finer voice than most actors would possess. All the principals sing in English that is regionally-inflected but understandable, rather than the over-enunciated “Opera English” that bedevils many American singers.
The secondary parts were all in firm hands. Standouts among them include iron-voiced tenor Roger Honeywell as the crazed preacher Veasey; bass Kevin Burdette as the Blind Man and, especially, Stobrod, making that failed father lovable despite his failings and acing his realistic depiction by actually playing the fiddle; and the appealing soprano Chelsea Basler, one of the company’s apprentice artists, as Sara, the lady with the crying baby.
This is Higdon’s first opera, and one sensed her striking a deferential posture toward these performers, editing her musical demands for the singers in a way she might not have if she had been writing for a clarinet or a violin. Apart from Ada’s aria, the solo moments seemed curtailed, lovely as far as they went, but rarely allowing the singer or the listener to bask in them fully. In this sense, one might experience the work less as an opera in the traditional sense than as a play with an elaborate musical component. It tends toward a declamatory style in its conversational vocal writing, and it can feel compelled to hurry on to the next episode when the listener might prefer to linger.
The first act set the tone of relating the plot in this way, and it seemed to earn the audience’s respect more than its affection. The second act scored more high points, including Ada’s aria, for sure, and also the chorus of the dead soldiers, “Buried and Forgotten,” which packs a potent punch. Another thrilling scene arrives when Inman and Ada finally are reunited, and all the characters Inman has encountered assemble on stage, adventure by adventure, urging him to tell his lady-love about what he has been through. It seemed to be a finale, and an effective one at that, but it yielded to several further scenes. What followed included important plot points and well-crafted music; an orchestral interlude here was an indisputably lovely section. But one nonetheless felt that the piece’s several endings may have come in the wrong order, at least from a musical point of view, and that an epilogue, cast in the story’s future, might possibly be excised — not because it wasn’t touching, but rather because the work could stand without it.
Santa Fe Opera’s production of Cold Mountain continues with performances on Aug. 5, 14, 17, 22 and 24. For ticket information, call 986-5900 or visit www.santafeopera.org.
