Lizzie Borden (opera)

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Opera dates
Title: Lizzie Borden
Lizzie Borden

Lizzie Borden

Shape: Opera in three acts
Original language: English
Music: Jack Beeson
Libretto : Kenward Elmslie and Richard Plant
Premiere: March 25, 1965
Place of premiere: New York City Center
Playing time: about 2 hours
Place and time of the action: Fall River (Massachusetts) , 1892
people

Lizzie Borden is an opera (original name: "A family portrait") in three acts by Jack Beeson (music) with a libretto by Kenward Elmslie based on a scenario by Richard Plant . It premiered on March 25, 1965 by the New York City Opera in the New York City Center . The opera is based on the real crime case of Lizzie Borden .

action

The banker Andrew Borden married his former servant Abigail after the death of his first wife. His two daughters from his first marriage, Elizabeth (Lizzie) and her younger sister Margret, loathe their stepmother. Margret in particular suffers from the gloomy mood in the family. Lizzie, on the other hand, seems to be better at handling it. The two sisters almost exclusively trust each other.

first act

Lizzie rehearses with the Old Harbor Children's Choir at her father's house. She gets along well with the children. The Reverend Harrington asked her to help her father to help the Church financially. Lizzie says, however, that only her stepmother could succeed in persuading the stingy father to make such an expense. Andrew comes in, ends the rehearsal, and forbids the Reverend to enter his house. There is an argument between Lizzie and her father. When she asks him for money for a new dress, he says she can just change one of the old clothes from the attic. The whole family gathers for dinner.

The two sisters sit thoughtfully at the window to the stunted garden, which does not get enough sun because of Andrew's high fence. Margret loves the captain Jason MacFarlane, who has just arrived with his ship. Lizzie advises her urgently to introduce Jason to her father so that he can ask for her hand. She goes to initiate the encounter. Margret is left alone with her thoughts.

Second act

Abigail recites a folk song about a swallow in spring. Since some keys on the old harmonium are broken, she persuades Andrew to buy her a piano for the next wedding anniversary. At her urging, Andrew also takes away the picture of Evangeline, his first wife, which is still hanging in the living room. Abigail tries to provoke Lizzie. Andrew steps in and orders his daughter to address Abigail as "mother". Lizzie is enraged about this. At that moment the Reverend Harrington brings in Captain MacFarlane and officially introduces him to the family as a member of the ward. Andrew realizes that Lizzie must have arranged it that way. As agreed, Jason asks for his daughter Margret's hand. Andrew replies that Jason probably only wanted to marry her because of the dowry. Instead he could marry his older daughter Lizzie. Then he tries in vain to get the suitor to leave the apartment.

After Jason leaves, Andrew heaped accusations on Lizzie. In return, she enumerates all the humiliations he has suffered. She gives in to her despair. If Jason kidnaps her sister, as she planned, she will also lose her only confidante.

Third act

To celebrate their wedding anniversary, Andrew and Abigail go out. Lizzie tailors her mother Evangeline's wedding dress for her sister. Jason appears at the garden door to get Margret on his ship. It is supposed to leave for the south the next day. Lizzie shows him the dress and tries it on in front of a mirror. She dreams of being Jason's bride herself and of being caressed by him. Then she notices that her mother-in-law has already returned - with a new hat and many packages. Abigail watched the whole scene. She makes fun of Lizzie. The two get into a heated argument.

In Lizzie's presence, Jason packs Margaret's things that he wants to take with him when he escapes. Lizzie finds a wad of his letters to Margret. She imagines that these were actually addressed to herself. Suddenly she hugs Jason. Abigail calls from the top of the stairs that Andrew is already on his way home. She asks Lizzie to prepare dinner and retires to take a nap. Lizzie can't hold back her anger anymore. She tears up the letters, grabs a Turkish halberd hanging on the wall and kills Abigail with it, still wearing the wedding dress. When her father arrives and goes to his room, Lizzie follows him upstairs.

Lizzie also murders her father. She comes under suspicion, but is acquitted in the following court hearing for lack of evidence. Rich in her father's inheritance, she moved to a nicer house "on the hill" (a better part of Fall River) and donated a large part of the money to the church.

A few years later, Lizzie is looking after financial matters at her father's bar table when the Reverend walks in. He reports on her sister's growing family and gives her back the donated money that his community refused to accept from her. After he has left, she locks the door. Children sing a mocking song behind the stage:

Lizzie Borden took an ax
And gave her mother forty whacks
When she saw what she had done
She gave her father forty-one.

layout

The authors characterized the characters psychologically with elements from the Elektra myth and a Freudian view of the tensions between daughter and father. The libretto therefore deviates from the real story in some points. Lizzie is not the banker's youngest daughter here, but the oldest. For her sensitive younger sister named Margret (instead of Emma), she is something of a mother substitute. Their love affair with Captain Jason MacFarlane is just as much an invention of the authors as the character of the Reverend Harrington or Abigail's past as a servant of the Bordens before the death of Andrew's first wife. Ultimately, the opera leaves no doubt about Lizzie's act. It's not about whether she committed the murder. The authors also forego a concrete presentation of the court hearing - it is only hinted at in the form of video projections. Instead, the opera focuses on the psychological reasons for Lizzie's act. No person is simply branded a villain. Even the father is at least human to Abigail. Abigail's aggressiveness towards Lizzie is explained by previous provocations.

The music of Beeson's Lizzie Borden is steeped in distinct dissonances, which appropriately express the horror of the plot. Some reviewers of the premiere therefore wrongly believed that it was an application of the twelve-tone technique . However, Beeson always described himself as a conservative composer - in contrast to the “modernists” of the 1960s, whose music was shaped by serialism . Lizzie Borden has a tonal basis. Despite some abrupt twists in the vowel lines, the tonal language seems rather moderate and eclectic. There are some lyrical or song-like passages and allusions to the music of the Victorian era.

The plot is framed by scenes with children. At the beginning Lizzie successfully rehearses with a children's choir. In the final scene she is mocked by the same children. Andrew's refusal to donate to the church is also mirrored when the Reverend Lizzie returns the money at the end.

orchestra

The orchestral line-up for the opera includes the following instruments:

Work history

The plot of the opera is based on a true story that happened in Fall River, Massachusetts in 1892 . At the time, Lizzie Borden was suspected of murdering her stepmother and father, but was acquitted at the trial. The actual course of events was never fully clarified.

Jack Beeson wrote his opera on behalf of the Ford Foundation for the New York City Opera . The original scenario for the opera version was developed by the German-born American writer Richard Plant . When he first met Beeson in 1954, Plant had been working on the subject for several years. In order to be able to convince Beeson of the dramatic potential, he combined it with the Elektra myth. The two initially put the project aside. At their next meeting in 1957, Plant already laid out the main features of the plot. In the years that followed, the details of the opera continued to develop. When Plant fell ill in 1961, he asked Kenward Elmslie , who had already worked with Beeson, to help him with the text. The libretto was completed towards the end of the summer of 1962. It took Beeson almost three more years to compose the music.

It premiered on March 25, 1965 in New York City Center . The conductor was Anton Coppola . The director was Nikos Psacharopoulos. Herbert Beattie (Andrew Borden), Ellen Faull (Abigail Borden), Brenda Lewis (Elizabeth Andrew Borden), Anne Elgar (Margret Borden), Richard Krause (Reverend Harrington) and Richard Fredericks (Captain Jason MacFarlane) sang . A little later, a television production for the National Educational Television Network was created with the same vocal cast.

The European premiere was on October 3, 1992 in the Hagen Theater in a German version by Astrid Rech-Richey. The musical director of the Philharmonic Orchestra Hagen had Gerhard Markson . The production was done by Helmut Straßburger , the set by Florian Etti and the costumes by Ilse Evers. The singers were Andreas Haller (Andrew Borden), Josephine Engelskamp (Abigail Borden), Ulla Sippola (Elizabeth Andrew Borden), Eva Pettersson (Margret Borden), Jürgen Dittebrand (Reverend Harrington) and Werner Hahn (Captain Jason MacFarlane). The production was shown as a guest performance in Wuppertal as part of the 3rd days of the New Music Theater in North Rhine-Westphalia in 1993.

In 1996 there was a new production of the opera by the New York City Opera in the form of a co-production with the Glimmerglass Opera. She was starred in a production by Rhoda Levine at the New York State Theater and the Glimmerglass Festival. The stage was by John Conklin, the costumes by Constance Hoffman. The conductors were Stewart Robertson (Glimmerglass) and George Manahan (New York). Stephen West (Andrew Borden), Lauren Flanigan (Abigail Borden), Phyllis Pancella (Elizabeth Andrew Borden), Robin Blitch Wiper (Margret Borden), Dennis Petersen (Reverend Harrington) and Dean Ely (Captain Jason MacFarlane) sang in New York . The performance on March 24th was broadcast live on television by the PBS broadcaster.

In November 2013, the Boston Lyric Opera played a newly created one-act chamber version of the opera in seven scenes, which was based even more on the mythological (Elektra) and Freudian elements and referred to the literary genre of American Gothic . The instrumentation of this version was created by Todd Bashore, the dramaturgy by John Conklin. Daniel Mobbs (Andrew Borden), Caroline Worra (Abigail Borden), Heather Johnson (Elizabeth Andrew Borden), Chelsea Basler (Margret Borden), Omar Najmi (Reverend Harrington) and David McFerrin (Captain Jason MacFarlane) sang here. This production was also played at the Tanglewood Festival the following year .

Recordings

  • 1965 - Anton Coppola (conductor), New York City Opera Orchestra.
    Herbert Beattie (Andrew Borden), Ellen Faull (Abigail Borden), Brenda Lewis (Elizabeth Andrew Borden), Anne Elgar (Margret Borden), Richard Krause (Reverend Harrington), Richard Fredericks (Captain Jason MacFarlane).
    Cast of the premiere.
    Audio: Desto 6455 (3 LPs) / New World Records NWCR694 (2 CDs).
  • 1965 - Anton Coppola (conductor), Cambridge Festival Orchestra.
    Soloists as in the CD recording.
    TV production, shortened by two interludes.
    Video: DVDVAI 4563.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f Allan Kozinn : Opera Review; Deeper Look Into the Tale Of a Daughter And an Ax . In: The New York Times, March 8, 1999, accessed February 15, 2018.
  2. ↑ a b c d e Boston Lyric Opera: Lizzie Borden Program Book ( online at ISSUU).
  3. ↑ a b Theater Hagen, 1992/93 season, issue 1.
  4. ^ A b Donald Jay Grout, Hermine Weigel Williams: A Short History of Opera. Fourth Edition. Columbia University Press, New York 2003, ISBN 0-231-11958-5 , p. 758.
  5. ↑ a b Work information from the music publisher Boosey & Hawkes , accessed on February 15, 2018.
  6. ↑ a b Karsten Steiger: Opera discography. Directory of all audio and video recordings. 2nd, fully updated and expanded task. KG Sauer, Munich 2008/2011, ISBN 978-3-598-11784-8 , p. 37.
  7. ↑ a b Brittaney Brentzel: Glimmerglass Remembers Jack Beeson. Obituary (English) on glimmerglass.org of June 7, 2010, accessed on February 15, 2018.
  8. ↑ Jörg Loskill: The third and last chapter “Days of the New Music Theater” in NRW. In: Opernwelt from September 1993, p. 5.
  9. ↑ Peter G. Davis: Mass. Murder. In: New York Magazine, March 22, 1999, accessed February 16, 2018.
  10. ^ Opera Annex: Lizzie Borden on blo.org, accessed February 16, 2018.
  11. ↑ Russell Platt: Best Revenge. A classic American opera comes to Tanglewood. In: The New Yorker, August 4, 2014, accessed February 15, 2018.
  12. ↑ DVD information from Opera News, accessed February 15, 2018.