FULL TRANSFORMATIONS (Conrad Susa) Pittsburgh PA 2024 Carnegie Mellon University
Information on the Performance
- Work Title: Transformations
- Composer: Conrad Susa
- Libretto: based on poems by Anne Sexton Libretto Text, Libretto Index
- Venue & Opera Company: Chosky Theatre, Purnell Center for the Arts, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Carnegie Mellon University School of Music
- Recorded: October 7-10, 2024
- Type: Staged Opera Live
- Singers: unknown
- Conductor: Robert Frankenberry
- Orchestra:
- Stage Director: Karina Aviva
- Costume Designer:
Information about the Recording
- Published by: Carnegie Mellon University School of Music
- Date Published: 2024
- Format: DVD
- Quality Video: 4 Audio:4
- Subtitles: yessubs, ensubs
- Video Recording from: YouTube FULL VIDEO
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON THIS PERFORMANCE
Transformations is a chamber opera in two acts by the American composer Conrad Susa with a libretto of ten poems by Anne Sexton from her 1971 book Transformations, a collection of confessional poetry based on stories by the Brothers Grimm. Commissioned by Minnesota Opera, the work, which is described by its composer as “An Entertainment in 2 Acts”, had its world premiere on 5 May 1973 at the Cedar Village Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Anne Sexton, who had worked closely with Susa on the libretto, was in the audience. It went on to become one of the most frequently performed operas by an American composer with its chamber opera format of eight singers and an instrumental ensemble of eight musicians making it particularly popular with smaller opera companies and conservatories. The 2006 revival production of Transformations at the Wexford Opera Festival won The Irish Times Theatre Award for Best Opera Production.
Synopsis
The opera is set in a mental hospital, with the patients acting out the tales, although some subsequent revivals have altered the setting. (See Background and performance history above.) The first scene, The Gold Key, is not one of the Grimms’ fairy tales, although the title is an allusion to their story, The Golden Key. In both Sexton’s original book and the opera, this poem introduces the sequence of re-told fairy tales to follow. As in the original book, each of the subsequent tales also has its own introduction and coda in which the poet comments to the audience on her perception of the significance of the story. Sexton and Susa selected nine of the original sixteen re-told tales for the opera. They are presented in the order in which they appeared in the original book. The first and last tales in the book (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Briar Rose) remain the first and last tales in the opera. According to Susa, “the poems are arranged with the author’s approval to emphasize the sub-plot which concerns a middle-aged witch who gradually transforms into a vulnerable beauty slipping into a nightmare.” The opera’s libretto sticks very closely (usually verbatim) to the wording in the poems. The comments below relate to some of the themes which critics have highlighted in each of Sexton’s “transformed” tales.
Act 1
Scene 1. The Gold Key – The speaker, Sexton herself (as a “middle-aged witch”, her frequent alter-ego), addresses an audience of adults by their first names. Children, the stereotypical audience for fairy tales, are nowhere mentioned. She then tells the story of a sixteen-year-old youth searching for answers, whom she proclaims to be “each of us”. He eventually finds a gold key that unlocks the book of Grimm’s Fairy Tales in their transformed state.[20]
Scene 2. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs – The vanity, fragility and naiveté of Snow White (“a dumb bunny” who must be protected by the dwarfs) eventually lead to her becoming the mirror image of her wicked stepmother.
Scene 3. The White Snake – Sexton satirizes marriage as a kind of “deathly stasis”,[21] writing of the young husband and wife, “they were placed in a box and painted identically blue and thus passed their days living happily ever after – a kind of coffin”.
Scene 4. Iron Hans – The wild man, Iron Hans, eventually freed from his cage becomes a parable for Sexton’s own struggles with insanity and society’s ambivalence to the mentally ill.
Scene 5. Rumpelstiltskin – Sexton’s sardonic view of motherhood, “He was like most new babies, as ugly as an artichoke but the Queen thought him a pearl”, co-exists with an urge to identify not with the protagonist/winner of the tale (the former miller’s daughter who becomes Queen) but rather with the antagonist/loser (Rumpelstiltskin), a theme which recurs in the following scene, Rapunzel.
Act 2
The prince discovers the sleeping Briar Rose in a painting by Henry Maynell Rheam
Scene 6. Rapunzel – Sexton portrays the witch, Mother Gothal, as a lesbian in love with Rapunzel, the young girl she has imprisoned. In the opera, Mother Gothal and Rapunzel sing a duet to “A woman who loves another woman is forever young”. Roger Brunyate, who directed the 1999 production at the Peabody Institute, also sees clear allusions in the story to Sexton’s beloved great-aunt, who died in a mental institution.
Scene 7. Godfather Death – Sexton’s version sticks fairly closely to the Grimms’ narrative, and is used to explore the simultaneous desire for and fear of death. The first stanza portrays death as a state of sexual frustration rather than the beginning of an afterlife: “Hurry, Godfather death, Mister tyranny, each message you give has a dance to it, a fish twitch, a little crotch dance”.[22] The theme is reinforced by the explicit sexual desire which leads to the physician’s fatal defiance of his Godfather. This poem is set, in contrast to the rest of the opera, as an entirely solo piece, a jazz ballad sung by Sexton at a microphone.
Scene 8. The Wonderful Musician – In the introductory lines to the tale, “My sisters, do you remember the fiddlers of your youth? Those dances so like a drunkard lighting a fire in the belly?”, Sexton explicitly compares women’s sexual response to music with the response of the animals whom the Wonderful Musician enchants and then cruelly entraps. The scene can be read as a cautionary tale about the demonic power of music, but on a deeper level about women cooperating in their own victimization.
Scene 9. Hansel and Gretel – The Grimms’ Hansel and Gretel is one of their darkest tales. Two young children repeatedly abandoned in a forest by their father and stepmother, narrowly escape from a cannibal witch by burning her alive in her own oven. Sexton follows the story quite closely but makes it even more disturbing by an introduction in which a mother affectionately pretends to “eat up” her little boy (sung in the opera as “The Witch’s Lullaby”). The conflation of mother love with cannibalism becomes explicit as the mother’s language becomes increasingly sadistic. “I want to bite, I want to chew […] I have a pan that will fit you. Just pull up your knees like a game hen.”
Scene 10. Briar Rose (The Grimms’ variant of Sleeping Beauty) – Sexton eliminates Briar Rose’s mother from the narrative and changes the ending of the tale considerably. As in the original, the Prince awakens Briar Rose from her 100-year sleep with a kiss, and the couple marry. However, her first words on being awakened are “Daddy! Daddy!”, and for the rest of her life Briar Rose suffers from insomnia. The tale itself is fairly short, preceded and followed by lengthy autobiographical stanzas in which Sexton explicitly alludes to her own psychiatric history involving controversial “recovered memories” of sexual abuse by her father and dissociative trance states.