The Father of Us All
about Of Mice and Men, for New York City Opera’s 2002-2003 season guide
Everything healthy in American opera composition and production can be recognized in this season’s revival of Carlisle Floyd’s Of Mice and Men at New York City Opera. The piece itself, a Ford Foundation commission of 1969, comes from the same visionary philanthropy that, for four seasons forty years ago, allowed NYCO to produce four glorious Aprils’ worth of a dozen new American operas each season—of which tradition VOX, NYCO’s current series of orchestral readings of a comparable number of new pieces, is the proud and self-conscious heir. This production is a revival of Rhoda Levine’s spare and luminous mounting at Glimmerglass Opera in 1997, wherein Anthony Dean Griffey offers again his transfixing portrayal of Lennie: as such, it continues NYCO’s robust tradition of repeated hearings of new American scores, without which even the most loudly applauded premières would vanish into history. And this Of Mice and Men underscores the close relationship this company has maintained with the opera’s indispensable composer-librettist. It was New York City Opera’s revivals of Floyd’s fierce, accomplished Susannah that helped establish that remarkable débutante in the American repertory. And Of Mice and Men might never have achieved its taut and compelling proportions had it not been at first rejected by the music director of New York City Opera.
John Steinbeck’s doomed dreamers under the pitiless Southwestern sky had long suggested music to Floyd. But the first draft of his libretto sprawled: and Julius Rudel, under whose baton Of Mice and Men was scheduled to receive its world première, cancelled the opening. Bitter news for the composer-librettist, who counted Rudel as a supporter—“I felt like the opera was getting an advance black eye before it had even been heard”—but the delay did the piece good. “I had made the fatal mistake of thinking that Steinbeck had done my work for me,” Floyd later told The New York Times. “So I never did the first and most important task, the basic compression. What is this story about?” Floyd scotched the first draft and started over in a leaner, freer, less literal mode—“(NYCO stage director) Tito Capobianco told me to simply assume that I had pretty well digested both book and play; my second libretto was a good one-third shorter than the first.” By the time Of Mice and Men opened in Seattle, in a production conducted by Anton Coppola and directed by Frank Corsaro, (another longtime artist of NYCO) it had lost one scene (a brothel interlude, to have been led by Elaine Bonazzi as the wry madam) and gained the power and focus that has since earned it stateside productions in Chicago, San Francisco, Houston, Miami, Cincinnati, Washington, and Boston—and, overseas, at Ireland’s Wexford Festival, in Amsterdam and Rotterdam, and, in 1999, in Bregenz, Austria.
The power of Of Mice and Men comes partly from the prairie existentialism of Steinbeck’s novel. The livid but loyal George, damned to tortured parenthood of the impossible Lennie, a helplessly violent child-angel in the body of a goon—these men are earthbound cousins to Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon, with the home they’ll never see standing in for absent Godot. But Floyd has concentrated their journey in three acts of striking economy. George’s dream to be free of Lennie, Lennie’s dream of a pet to love, both men’s longing for a home, Curley’s wife’s fantasies of stardom—in Act One, these hopeless hopes form a single emotional leitmotiv, a ground-bass of loneliness that binds the small dark events of the opera into a crypto-symphonic meditation on lives unfulfilled. What was mere exposition in Act One heats to boiling conflict in Act Two. George and Lennie’s dreams of a home gain detail and possibility when the ranchhand Candy offers to stake them to a mortgage; and now the petulant wife’s demand for attention disrupts and challenges, rather than merely follows, the laborers’ dream-trio of home. Act Three brings the previous themes to conclusions as heartbreaking as they are symmetrical. Lennie mistakes Curley’s wife for the pet he’d longed for in Act One, and, just as he’d done with that hapless mouse, accidentally kills her. George’s choice is either to kill Lennie with his own hands or leave him to the mercies of a lynch mob: in a devastating revisitation of Act One, Scene Two, in which the gleeful laborers shoot Candy’s old dog because “it has to be done,” George exhorts Lennie to imagine the only home he’ll ever know—their hoped-for home of the first scene—before sending him to his death. In synopsis, Of Mice and Men can seem fragmentary and situational—a strange, prairie-Gothic anecdote evoking less tragedy than pathos. But Floyd’s sharp and merciful attention to these characters’ emotional patterns push the drama to a deeper level. The Dust Bowl anecdote acquires momentum of Aeschylean inevitability.
As does the score. Listeners who only know the fierce folk-inflections of Susannah may be surprised by the wayward meters, glittering textures, and harmonies dense and strange that enrich the vocal and orchestral writing of Of Mice and Men. True, folk idioms reappear, naturally enough, in the ranchhands’ casual ensembles, but they’re used there as color, not structure: and it would be as inappropriate to overstress Floyd’s employment of it here as it would be to reduce Verdi to a mere arranger of Neapolitan streetsong, or to call Britten’s score to Gloriana but an elaborate footnote to Dowland. Floyd’s harmonies, often built on pairs of intervals subtly different in tonal center, suggest simultaneous keys even in the leanest textures; his vocal writing, particularly for Curley’s wife, balances syllabic and melismatic writing to precise emotional effect; and his rhythms, following minutely the inflections of American speech, paradoxically achieve that most French of musical values, e.g., the illusion that phrase alone (rather than downbeat) defines the singing line. Floyd’s thematic development, too, is spacious yet structured. The critical “home” theme is only rarely literally repeated in the score, and yet its final utterance at the opera’s conclusion peals like the bell of fate itself.
In short, Of Mice and Men is a serious, richly worked, and emotionally generous opera—among the most finest ever composed in this country—and there’s yet another reason why it’s good to have it back in the city, and at the company, that has supported it so strongly in the past. In the late 1960s, when Floyd was composing most frequently, opera placed scant value on musical or ethnic diversity: and it would be disingenuous to pretend that the largely Northeastern, largely modernist new-music establishment of those years looked with perfect fairness on a tonal composer from the American South. Things change: in the past twenty years alone New York has applauded the premieres of The Ghosts of Versailles, X, The Voyage, Marco Polo—proof, if any were needed, that America knows that no one voice or style holds the monopoly on vital, searching, fully-realized music-drama. Carlisle Floyd of Latta, South Carolina, (whose latest opera, Cold Sassy Tree, is only the most lighthearted addition to his distinguished catalogue) bids fair for the title—to paraphrase Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson—of Father of Us All. For this reason, too, I suggest, NYCO’s Of Mice and Men is as good for American opera as it is for New York.