Word: novellas
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...reads that infamous line from Puccini's opera Madame Butterfly, the story of an American naval officer, Benjamin Franklin (B.F.) Pinkerton, who abandons his Japanese wife, Cio-Cio San (Butterfly). The story, based on John Luther Longs novella, has been retold, again and again, in such productions as Broadways Miss Saigon and Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado. Most recently, BSO takes on a fully staged concert version of Puccini's opera at Symphony Hall, with the last and final performance this coming Saturday...
Edith Wharton's well known novella, Ethan Frome--a tale of love, forbidden passion and its tragic consequences--lends itself particularly well to a genre whose main intention is to represent and express human feelings on a grander scale. And that genre is none other than opera. Opera vows to unite music and poetry so as to engage the audience in feeling as much empathy, compassion and even terror as possible...
...certainly cozy to be seated near the orchestra and to see all of the musicians, it eventually becomes distracting; the orchestra even drowns out the singing at some points. The stage itself is sparsely decorated: though not out of sync with the plain New England farmhouse of Wharton's novella, it still appears lacking. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that the stage is so small that the actors often have nowhere...
Indeed, the slowness and heaviness that characterized the opera Ethan Frome precisely mirrors the tone of the novella. Allanbrook certainly does not change the focus of the novella and his opera portrays the slowness with which life progresses for the Fromes--particularly for Ethan, whose long-defunct love of Zeena causes his perpetual agony. Although the opera's most dramatic scenes--the breaking of Zeena's prize pickle plate and the infamous sledding scene in which Mattie and Ethan encounter their fateful punishment--are a little played down, this seems appropriate when viewed from Wharton's original perspective. In their...
...downplaying these small moments of mayhem,Ethan Frome pays homage to Wharton, making them all the more powerful. Ethan Frome is not sturm und drang, but rather a tale of mute desperation. Allanbrook Sr. and Hunt should be commended for keeping their opera true to a difficult, complex novella...