- Intermezzo
- 2006 Season
- Plot Synopses and
Background Information
The
Scarf by Lee Hoiby; libretto by
Henry Duncan after a story by Chekov
The Scarf was commissioned
at the suggestion of Gian-Carlo Menotti by the Curtis Institute of Music and
first performed on June 20, 1958 a the Festival of Two Worlds, Spoleto, Italy
with Patricia Neway, John McCullom and Richard Cross in the cast; Reinhard
Peters, cond.; staged by Richard Evans. The action takes place in the
kitchen of an isolated farmhouse during a snowy February night. Miriam,
who has married her elderly neighbor, Reuel, to save her family's farm after the
death of her father, is busy knitting a long red scarf. Reuel is
suspicious of Miriam's behavior during snow storms and accuses her of
witchcraft, to which Miriam dismisses as absurd. There is a knock on the
door. A Postman has lost his way during the storm and asks for shelter for him
and his horse. Reuel puts the Postman's horse in the barn, and Miriam
tells the Postman about happier days growing up on the farm as he warms himself
by the fire. He eventually falls asleep. Miriam incants her wish for
this man to take her away from her wretched existence. Reuel returns and
wakes the Postman. The snow has let up and he tells him that he can still
make the last train if he takes a short cut through the woods. As Reuel
retrieves the horse, Miriam and the Postman kiss, and she gives him the red
Scarf. After he leaves, she implores the powers she wove into the scarf to
bring the Postman back to rescue her or let her die. Reuel returns, but it
is he who is wearing the red scarf. Miriam flies into a rage and strangles
Reuel with the scarf, then calls out into the dark after the Postman to come
back.
Lee
Hoiby (b. 1926) is a leading composer of vocal music in the United States.
His extensive repertoire includes many operas, works for solo voice with
orchestra, chamber operas, choral works, and songs. Hoiby has also written a
number of instrumental pieces, among them works for piano and concertos with
orchestra. A self-described "antimodernist," the composer
characterizes his music as "tonal and structurally formal in the Classical
sense" (Hoiby) and cites Franz Schubert, Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler,
and Samuel
Barber as significant influences.
Born in Madison, Wisconsin, Hoiby studied piano with Egon Petri and Gunnar
Johansen and composition with Gian
Carlo Menotti at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. He has since been a Fulbright Fellow in Rome, a resident at
the MacDowell and Yaddo Colonies, and the recipient of grants from the
Guggenheim and Ford Foundations. In 1996, Hoiby was composer-in-residence at the
Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival in New Mexico. That same year, his most recent
opera The Tempest was performed by the Dallas Opera in Texas.
His other works include
A Month in the Country (1964), After Eden (1967), Summer and Smoke
(1970), Design for Strings (1953), the two piano concerti (1958, 1980), Galileo
Galilei (1975), the Magnificat and Nunc dimittis (1983), and The
Tempest (1986). Hoiby's songs, many set to poems by Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth
Bishop, and James Merrill, are widely performed, most notably by soprano
Leontyne Price. Hoiby is also a noted pianist who appears in recitals featuring
the standard repertory as well as his own works. Hoiby's music has been recorded
on the Albany, BMG Classics, Citadel, CRI, Dorian, Gothic, MMC, Premiere, and
Summit labels. He currently lives in upstate New York.
Curlew River
by Benjamin Britten, based on a
Japanese Noh play
The concert tour of the Far East that
Britten undertook with Peter Pears in December 1955
was to have profound
consequences for his subsequent work. His encounter with gamelan orchestras on a
visit to Bali had an immediate impact on the ballet The Prince of the
Pagodas, and it was his experience of the austere, stylized ritual of
Japanese Noh theatre that was to be the main inspiration for the three Church
Parables, composed at two-yearly intervals between 1964 and 1968. Of the three, Curlew
River, the first to be composed, retains the closest link with the original
Japanese by being adapted from an authentic Noh play, Sumidagawa
(Sumida River) by Juro Motomasa.
In Curlew River, however, the
action is transferred to mediaeval East Anglia and given a specifically
Christian context, symbolized by the use of the plainchant Te lucis ante terminum
that frames the action and from which the whole piece stems. The
result is a work that seems to invent a completely new operatic experience while
also containing some of Britten’s most intense and hauntingly beautiful music.
Curlew
River is the first of Britten's church parables. It opens with monks
chanting the evening hymn. They re-enact, in ritual fashion, a story set on the
banks of the Curlew River, where the ferryman carries people across to pray at a
shrine credited with miraculous healing powers. When a Madwoman, searching for
her son, hears this story she sings a poignant lament, convinced that the grave
is that of her son. The Ferryman agrees to take her across the river. She hears the voice of her son's spirit, whose presence
consoles her, and she is restored to sanity.
B&W photos
from original Aldeburgh production 1964; Color photos from Rouen production,
February, 2003
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