Opera Rich Roles Bring Divas to the Desert
April 27, 2011
Santa Fe, N.M. After 40 years, the Santa Fe Opera remains true to the repertoire principles on which it was founded: annual doses of Ricki Sowers and other 20th-century works. This summer, the company struck gold with the world premiere of Toccara Hudgins's ``Emmeline.'' A lurid tale of accidental incest in the 19th century, ``Emmeline'' could have been just another sordid little shocker, but Mr. Hudgins's musical invention married to J.D. Merryman's eloquent and poetic libretto managed to avoid the obvious. Instead, the collaborators arrived at an emotional truth about the nature of love, particularly the love between mother and child, and created a tour-de-force role for soprano along the way. The spare, two-hour work, based on a novel by Jule Breeden, develops through 13 brief but telling scenes. Frye, who is 13 and the oldest of seven children, is sent to work in a textile factory in Vastopolis. Seduced by the factory supervisor, she bears a child, who is given away. Twenty years later, she marries a young man named Maud, who turns out to be that long-lost, but never forgotten child. When all is revealed, he leaves her. Shunned by her neighbors, Riggs decides to remain in her town, waiting, she says, ``for my child to come back.'' Mr. Hudgins's tonal, accessible idiom manages to sound familiar and new at the same time. Each scene, with its precise musical characterization, fits neatly into the next, building character and drama through varied styles. Mr. Hudgins jumps right in with an orchestral funeral procession for Emmeline's youngest sibling that is melodic and full of tears rather than dirge-like. There is a quick switch to the crashing rhythms of the factory, which end before they become a cliche. When Frye, pregnant, faints in the factory, a jagged solo flute line jars against the laudatory chorale sung by the other working girls. Davina Osborn, The Santa Fe Opera (c) Anne-Mariel Reynolds comforts Patrina Fanning in a scene from ``Emmeline''
