Big Mama

Monadnock gives us Virgil Thomson's The Mother of Us All

by Lloyd Schwartz

Nice thing about celebrating a centennial -- you get to hear lots of things that otherwise don't get heard. This year marked the 100th birthday of Virgil Thomson (who was born in Kansas City, Missouri, and died in New York only seven years ago). Thomson has got to be the most American of all American composers, and perhaps for that very reason he hasn't always been taken as seriously by the musical establishment as he deserved to be -- certainly not as seriously as he himself thought he deserved to be.

But this summer at Lincoln Center, we had the opportunity to hear his first collaboration with Gertrude Stein, their 1934 opera, Four Saints in Three Acts (in a production by Robert Wilson that I thought destroyed its elusive balance between the poignantly fanciful and the profoundly spiritual). And last week in the Peterborough (New Hampshire) Town House, Monadnock Music, under its music director, James Bolle, presented a vital and vividly exuberant concert version of Thomson's last collaboration with Stein (and Stein's very last work), their postwar opera about Susan B. Anthony, The Mother of Us All.

Bolle is one of Thomson's few real champions in this country. In 1991 he led the first professional uncut performance of Thomson's last opera, Lord Byron (with a libretto by Jack Larson, alias Jimmy Olsen, cub reporter). He's more of an architect than a technician. Bolle performances invariably have their rough edges. But they have a definite dramatic shape. In a work of such spirited character (though much of that celebratory spirit is also elegiac -- a tone Bolle and his troops likewise captured), the brashness may be more a virtue than a liability. And he and an orchestra of soloists know -- and celebrate -- the difference between a waltz and a march.

In fact, though there was no stage movement, the visualization of the performance had more to do with the real opera that Thomson and Stein wrote than all of Robert Wilson's expensive non sequiturs. The cast -- eight principals playing some 24 roles plus chorus, with additional small solos -- sat behind red-white-and-blue bunting (as if at a convention), a big American flag hanging over the orchestra behind them. As each singer stood to sing his or her lines, he or she propped up a placard with his or her character's name. Some of this was done in lightning succession, and it both helped to identify the character and served to indicate the witty playfulness of Stein's book and Thomson's quicksilver musical realization of it. Characters were able to appear and disappear more quickly than they possibly could have in a fully staged version, in which each part would require a different singer.

This simple device also gave the singers a chance to project contrasting temperaments. It was delightful and touching to see -- and hear -- mezzo-soprano D'Anna Fortunato change demeanor and timbres as Susan B.'s shyly reticent companion, Anne; the spunkier, more independent Indiana Elliot, who won't give up her surname when she marries Jo the Loiterer (tenor Todd Geer, in a sweetly earthbound characterization) unless he gives up his, too, which is what he finally, reluctantly, ends up doing ("What's in a name?" Somebody Else asks; "Everything," Susan B. replies); and the even tougher Jenny Reefer. Baritone James Maddalena sang both the lugubrious Daniel Webster ("He digged a pit, he digged it deep, he digged it for his brother," he dirges) and the sturdily professorial Donald Gallup ("I am tall as a man. I am firm as a clam."). Fortunato even got to have a dialogue with herself. She and Maddalena split a total of eight roles between them, and they were all heavenly.

The MC roles of Virgil T. and Gertrude S. (like the Compère and Commère in Four Saints) were played with bravado and panache by baritone Thomas Jones (who also played Chris the Citizen, Jo the Loiterer's friend) and mezzo Victoria Vibbert (who also played the important role of the playwright Constance Fletcher, which she seemed more taxed by vocally). Bass baritone Donald Sherrill was appropriately stentorian and belligerent as both Ulysses S. Grant and Indiana Elliot's Brother. Soprano Susan Narucki made a glamorous (though slim) Lillian Russell and Angel More, Daniel Webster's sentimentally conceived (she's accompanied by a harp) deceased girlfriend (it's that kind of opera), though her singing was reedy. In smaller roles, there was excellent support from Katherine Galvin-Maddalena, Alan Jordan, and Mark-Andrew Cleveland.

Soprano Mary Burgess filled the central role of Susan B. ("I even speak louder than I can") Anthony with a kind of heroic dignity, graciousness, and untouchable inner strength. Her sincerity was never caricatured, almost abstract, in fact, hardly "acted" at all, just luminously there. Some years ago, she made a splendid Amelia in Monadnock's concert performance of Verdi's Un ballo in maschera -- she's that kind of singer. The years have frayed her voice some, and this is nothing if not a strenuous role. And yet, in the great final aria, "In my long life" (which Thomson asked to have sung at his funeral), her voice sounded clearer and warmer than ever, especially in the final radiant pianissimos, which are followed by three measures of silence and then a solemn C-major chord. That's what I call a happy ending.