Cold Mountain (opera)

Cold Mountain is an opera written by Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer Jennifer Higdon and set to an English libretto by Gene Scheer based on Charles Frazier's award-winning novel of the same name, published in 1997, which won the 1997 National Book Award and was made into a film of the same title in 2003.

The opera is to be given its world premiere at The Santa Fe Opera on August 1, 2015 conducted by Miguel Harth-Bedoya and directed by Leonard Foglia.^[1] It was co-commissioned by and will be a co-production with both Opera Philadelphia and the Minnesota Opera.^[2]

The Philadelphia company will present the work in February 2016 as part of its "American Repertoire Program", a ten-year commitment to produce a contemporary American work each season.^[3] The Minnesota production will be staged in 2018, but specific dates have not been announced. For The Santa Fe Opera, it will be the 46th American and 4th world premiere in its 59 seasons.^[4]

The production will coincide with the 150th anniversary of the ending of the American Civil War.

For the premiere, the role of the main protagonist, W. P. Inman, a wounded Southern infantryman who deserts from the army to make his way back to the woman who is waiting for him, will be sung by American baritone Nathan Gunn^[4] and the role of Ada will be sung by mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard.^[1]

Composition history

Development of the opera, 2009 to 2011

The collaboration between librettist and composer had been in the works for some years before being announced in 2011. The American librettist Gene Scheer, who wrote the libretto, had developed previous projects with composer Jake Heggie, most recently in writing the libretto for Moby Dick for the Dallas Opera, which premiered in 2010 and which was also directed by Leonard Foglia. Jennifer Higdon is a Philadelphia resident who is Rock Chair in Composition at the Curtis Institute of Music. She was awarded both the Pulitzer Prize in Music for her Violin Concerto and a Grammy Award in 2010 for her Percussion Concerto.

In a long article in the Philadelphia Inquirer on August 14, 2011, music critic David Patrick Stearns discussed several of the changes taking place within the then-named Opera Company of Philadelphia (now known simply as Opera Philadelphia). He traced the evolution of Cold Mountain, stating that: "The announcement of the Higdon opera, which was initially commissioned by the San Francisco Opera but foundered there, also unveiled a larger collaboration with Santa Fe." ^[5] Initially, this collaboration with the Santa Fe company began with the co-commissioning and co-production of composer Theodore Morrison's Oscar in Santa Fe in July 2013; it will be staged in Philadelphia in February 2015.^[6]

Regarding the composition of Cold Mountain, Stearns continues:

the project had seemed dead when Higdon and librettist Gene Scheer split with the San Francisco Opera. The project's two years under San Francisco's aegis, 2009 to 2011, were mostly spent looking for subject matter and being thwarted, sometimes by lack of suitability for operatic adaptation, but more significantly by rights issues. "We went through several dozen [properties]," said Higdon. "Getting Cold Mountain took 10 months of pushing and taking back avenues to make it work. It was a major ordeal. Miramax, which holds some of the rights [because of its 2003 film version....], was up for sale when all of this was going on, and we had to wait until it was bought." Earlier this year, however, the commission for what was to be Higdon's first opera was canceled. A spokesman for the San Francisco Opera said the parties parted over financial terms."^[5]

But Stearns goes further in his examination of why the project foundered: "[Higdon] also cited conflicts with San Francisco Opera general director David Gockley, who built an extensive new-opera record in his years running the Houston Grand Opera, and who takes what Higdon described as an interventionist approach toward the creative process. "Other people have done operas with him, and that's the way he works," she said. "I didn't feel that it was right to ask him to change the way he runs his opera company."^[5]

The composer at work: finding her "opera voice"

One year into writing the opera—on November 16, 2012—Higdon was interviewed by Jim Cotter of the Philadelphia radio station, WRTI.fm. In a seven-minute interview she talks about some of the challenges in finding her subject and then in writing an opera for the first time: "Jennifer Higdon on Cold Mountain

When participating in the New York classical music station WQXR.org's "Q2 Music Series" progam in January 2014, Jennifer Higdon discussed her approach to writing for the voice - and for her first opera - by drawing on a wide range of musical sources. Her "playlist" of music presented on the radio broadcast can be found here.

She describes the process of finding her "opera voice":

For the past couple of years, I have been working my way through the writing of my first opera. Needless to say, this has led me to obsess over the voice: how it conveys emotion, tells a story, and underlines the psychological emotion of a situation (or a character’s state of mind). A pattern has emerged where there are certain recordings that I am revisiting repeatedly, trying to figure out what will effectively convey the story that I am attempting to tell about the South, at the end of the Civil War, with characters who find themselves in a newly configured world, both inside themselves and in a ravaged landscape.

This playlist constitutes a regular soundtrack of my own journey. As is typical, it runs a gamut of musical variety (I never listen to just classical music) from instrumental works that have a “Southern” flavor (as well as a lyricism that mimics the voice): Visconti, Puckett, and Bunch; to the sung word in a classical vein (Schneider, Sametz, Lang, Britten). Add to that a country/bluegrass sensibility (Thile and the enthusiastically original Nickel Creek).

And as is always the case, the Beatles keep me company with such a variety of color^[7]...I feel like they are a never-ending provocation of the palette creation of interesting textures. From traditionally old to very recent “pop”…it all contributes to building a sound world for telling an intense story.^[8]

The opera is finished

Just two years after the initial announcement, Higdon announced on September 16, 2013 that she had completed the music for the opera:

Higdon says that the opera took her 20 months to compose, working 8 hours daily. In describing her immediate feelings upon completing the work, she wrote: "When I put the double bar on, it literally felt like Ada was the last to leave the room, and she closed the door behind her as she went out. I was sitting there alone, listening to the silence. Not sure whether to laugh, smile, or weep".^[9]

In the first half of a 40-minute podcast interview with Phil Oliver, "The Musicalist", Higdon describes her feelings about finishing the opera and the additional work she has been doing with the orchestration as well as making a few adjustments. She notes that she insisted on keeping the opera under two-and-a-half hours. She talks about her growing interest in opera over the last six years, that she has been looking at many different opera scores and attending productions of new operas throughout the country. Towards the end of the interview she also talks about some of her most recent music. ^[10]

In an interview with Tom Huizenga which appears on npr.org and which was published in September 2014, Higdon comments on what it was like to live with the characters about whom she was writing for over two years, and she notes one unexpected consequence:

I didn't realize that I would be carrying these characters in my head and heart for about two and a half years...But in many ways, living inside the opera, which it felt like I did, was not like anything I've ever experienced before. The entire group stayed with me day and night. I've been pretty absent from the present day world for quite some time. That type of concentrated creativity has been amazing to experience.^[11]

Roles

Role	Voice type	Announced world premiere cast, August 1, 2015 (Conductor: Miguel Harth-Bedoya) [1]
Inman	baritone	Nathan Gunn
Ada	mezzo soprano	Isabel Leonard
Ruby	soprano	Emily Fons
Teague	tenor	Jay Hunter Morris
Veasy		tba
Monroe / Solder / Guard		Robert Pomakov
Stobrod / Blind Man	Baritone	Kevin Burdette

Performance history

Pre-production workshops at the Curtis Institute

As has become typical in the development of new operas from the score to the stage, the Curtis Institute of Music in Phildelphia (where Higdon is on the composition faculty) planned two workshops, one for each act and spread a year apart. In December 2012 a group of 16 student singers met for one week having received a copy of the score several months in advance and having had the opportunity to work on their characters with a coach.

The Wall Street Journal 's music critic Heidi Waleson in the Curtis publication, Overtones, recounts what happened at the second workshop experience—this time for act 2 of Cold Mountain—which was given in December 2013:

In December, Dr. Higdon spent an intensive week in the heart of the opera world as she, her librettist Gene Scheer, dramaturg and director Leonard Foglia, and sixteen student singers workshopped the opera’s second act. As they had done with Act 1 a year earlier, the singers performed the act scene-by-scene for two three-hour sessions each day, giving the creators the opportunity to assess the piece and make the changes necessary to strengthen it.^[12]

For Gene Scheer, the creator of many opera libretti, having the intensive preparation go into the process was in definite contrast to "professional workshops [which] frequently happen so quickly that preparation time is lacking.....You want the material to be done well enough so you can assess if the problem is the material or the performance.....These singers were so good and so well prepared that we got a really honest assessment."^[12] Leonard Foglia, who will direct the Santa Fe premiere, noted that the workshop gave them time:

to diagnose every single scene, and the whole arc of the characters. I’m always looking for clarity. Is it in the music? the libretto? the performance? And because an opera score is so complicated, changes other than a clean cut are often hard to make. However, we made a major change in act 2: We moved a scene. Being able to do that, on the spot, with the singers—to flip scenes, and hear it one way, and then another way—was invaluable.^[12]

And for the composer preparing her first opera, "it was pretty impressive how they embraced the characters," Dr. Higdon says of the singers. "they felt real ownership. It’s very emotional, and with the end of the workshop, there’s a little bit of mourning going on...[because] I haven’t had that much contact with singers before, and I've learned a lot about what they do, and what they care about," she says. "That’s what music is about, relationships. And that’s what this opera is about, too."^[12]

References

Notes

External links

• Jennifer Higdon's website
• Gene Scheer's website