Carlisle Floyd

(b Latta, sc, 11 June 1926). American composer. He studied with Ernst Bacon at Syracuse University (1945-9). In 1947 he joined the faculty of Florida State University and in 1976 was appointed a professor at the University of Houston. His operas are an important part of American music-drama; they include Susannah (1955), Wuthering Heights (1958), Of Mice and Men (1970) and Willie Stark (1981), and are well crafted and stage-worthy though eclectic and conservative.

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Carlisle Floyd (born 1926) brought abilities as librettist and dramatist to the composition of opera. Writing mostly in the "verismo" tradition, Floyd achieved considerable success with his third opera, Susannah, although he continued to refine and develop his techniques in later works.

Carlisle Floyd was born in Latta, South Carolina, on June 11, 1926. He received his first piano lessons from his mother at the age of ten, but divided his attentions among literature, graphic arts, sports, and music throughout his high school years. At Spartanburg College, where he began studying in 1943 on a scholarship, Floyd's writing abilities earned him first prize in a contest for one-act plays. When in 1945 his piano teacher, Ernst Bacon, accepted a post at Syracuse University, Floyd followed him there in order to continue studying with him.

Floyd received his bachelor of music degree from Syracuse in 1946 and in the following year began teaching piano at Florida State University. In 1948 he organized a course - the first of its kind anywhere - dealing with the problems of relating music and text in the composition of opera. As professor of music he taught composition at Florida State University until 1976. In that year he accepted a post at the University of Houston where, in addition to the duties of professor, he became co-director of the Houston Opera Studio. He also served as chairman of the Opera Musical Theater of the National Endowment for the Arts.

19th Century Roots

Floyd was best known for his operas, most of which are in the verismo tradition. This movement has its roots in the realism of the 19th-century dramatists such as Zola, Flaubert, Ibsen, and Hauptmann, who replaced an idealistic and often fantastic subject matter with one grounded in believable events, often with a contemporary, moral message. Earlier operatic composers who allied themselves with this movement were Mascagni, Leoncavallo, and (to some extent) Puccini, and later Menotti and Moore.

Floyd's first major success and, indeed, perhaps his best-known work was his third opera, Susannah, (written 1953-1954) and first produced at Florida State University on February 24, 1955. It combined the features of verismo with those of folk opera, and hence contained music reminiscent of hymns, folk songs, and square dances, though not actually using previously existing music. Floyd wrote his own libretto, as he did for all of his 11 operas. Here he borrowed the apocryphal story of Susannah and the Elders, but set it in the mountains of present-day Tennessee. The consequences of a conflict between narrow religious dogma and straightforward folk honesty were depicted through the seduction of the heroine by Reverend Blitch and the avenging of Susannah's dishonor by her brother, who kills Blitch. Both the libretto and the music are direct, uncomplicated, and emotional. The text was treated in a variety of ways. Many of the arias utilize modal scales characteristic of folk music. In addition to recitative, which is always sensitive to the natural inflections of speech, Floyd employed spoken sections and, briefly, Sprechstimme (halfway between speech and song). Conventional harmonic language serves the purposes of folk description.

In 1958 Floyd completed another major opera, Wuthering Heights, on a commission from the Santa Fe Opera. Floyd's libretto departed from his usual American setting in its basis on the Emily Brontë novel. He did, however, seek to have the characters speak in a manner that was essentially timeless in character rather than identifiably contemporary or Victorian. He also chose to use only the first half of the book, as he felt that both the shifting emphasis to Heathcliff and the introduction of a second generation in the second half would necessitate proportions unacceptable to opera.

Greater Acclaim to Come

Several of Floyd's later operas received higher critical acclaim than either Susannahor Wuthering Heights, chiefly for the greater sophistication of their melodies, but none became more popular. Among his later operas were: The Passion of Jonathan Wade (1962), commissioned by the New York City Opera on a grant from the Ford Foundation; The Sojourner and Mollie Sinclair (1963), a one-act opera commissioned by the Carolina Charter Tercentenary Commission and intended for television; Markheim (1966); Of Mice and Men (1969); Bilby's Doll (1976), commissioned by the Houston Opera with a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and containing instances of atonal writing unusual for Floyd; and Willie Stark (1980), commissioned jointly by the Houston Opera and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. All revealed Floyd's gifts as a writer of lyrical melodies and his flair for the theater. Compositions outside the realm of opera include: Pilgrimage (1956), a cantata for voice and orchestra; a piano sonata (1957); Introduction, Aria, and Dance (1967) for orchestra; Flower and the Hawk (1972), a monodrama for soprano and orchestra; and In Celebration (1978), an overture for orchestra.

Not Just Opera

The non-operatic works of Floyd gained increasing attention in later years. In 1993, his orchestral song cycle Citizen of Paradise, based on the poems and letters of Emily Dickenson, premiered. A Time to Dance was commissioned by the American Choral Directors Association and in March 1994 performed by the Westminster Choir and the San Antonio Symphony at the association's biennial convention.

Awards and honors received by Floyd are numerous. Among the more notable are a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1956 and the National Opera Institute's Award for Service to American Opera, the highest honor the institute bestows, which he received in 1983. Additionally, Floyd in 1976 became the first chairman of the Opera/Musical Theater Panel when the program was created by the National Endowment for the Arts. He also was selected to be the keynote speaker at Opera America's annual conference in 1997.

In addition, Floyd continued teaching at the university level, sharing his gifts with others who someday might rival or surpass his stature in the operatic world. He was associated with the University of Houston School of Music for 20 years. When he retired from teaching in 1996, he left behind the school's distinguished M.D. Anderson Chair and the legacy of having helped build a highly respected music program. Upon his departure from academia, Floyd referred to his retirement as his "third act" and expressed the intention to pursue the creation of more operatic works.

Further Reading

David Ewen's American Composers: A Biographical Dictionary (1982) contains a complete but not always reliable biography. Floyd discussed his opera Wuthering Heights in a lengthy article in the New York Times (July 13, 1958). Howard Taubman reviewed the same opera in the New York Times (April 10, 1959), and Susannah, also in the New York Times (September 28, 1956). More recently in the same newspaper (October 15, 1983) Donal Henahan reviewed Of Mice and Men.

• Period: Contemporary (1950- )
• Country: USA
• Born: June 11, 1926 in Latta, SC
• Genres: Opera

Biography

The accessible operas of this American composer include the international success Susannah, a repertory mainstay ever since its compostion. Floyd employed a distinctive harmonic language based on fourths and fifths to create melodies and harmonies inspired by American folk tunes, and he was an effective dramatist in the vein opened up by Puccini and mined by Hindemith.

Carlisle Sessions Floyd was born in South Carolina to a Methodist pastor whose wife was a pianist. Lessons with his mother started at age ten, and at 16 Floyd went to Converse College in Spartanburg to study piano with Ernst Bacon. When Bacon was named to the faculty at Syracuse University in 1945, Floyd relocated in order to continue his course of study. Floyd earned his bachelor's in music at Syracuse in 1946, and took up a position teaching piano at Florida State University in Tallahassee, where he remained until 1976, eventually adding composition and opera workshops to his curriculum.

From the beginning of his career, Carlisle Floyd was interested primarily in opera, and furnished all of his own libretti. His first effort in the genre was Slow Dusk (1949) given at Syracuse. Floyd's next opera, Fugitives (1951), was withdrawn after a single performance at Florida State. Susannah (1955) was based on the apocryphal biblical story of Susannah and the elders, but transferred to rural Tennessee, and was an immediate smash when heard at the New York City Opera in 1956. The 29-year-old Floyd won, in quick succession, the New York Music Critics' Circle Award, a Guggenheim Foundation grant, and the envy of many of his colleagues. Susannah has gone on to become Floyd's best-known and most frequently produced work; it requires only modest economic means to produce.

Floyd's next undertaking, Wuthering Heights (1958-1959), proved troublesome, after it was first performed in Santa Fe in July 1958. Floyd found it necessary to rewrite the entire third act. His next project, The Passion of Jonathan Wade (1962) remains Floyd' s largest-scale opera, requiring seven principals and an orchestra roughly the dimension of that required by Puccini. In the midst of Jonathan Wade, Floyd managed to work up The Sojourner and Mollie Sinclair for the tercentenary celebration of North Carolina in 1963. Markheim followed in New Orleans in 1966, and in Seattle in 1970 Floyd finally scored his second unchallenged hit, Of Mice and Men, based on John Steinbeck's novel. Like Susannah, this work has enjoyed numerous revivals both with regional professional opera companies and in university productions.

In 1972 aspiring opera producer David Gockley attended a Cincinnati Opera performance of Of Mice and Men, and it opened his eyes to the potential of contemporary American works. Soon after, Gockley assumed control of the Houston Grand Opera, and in 1976 convinced Floyd to leave his long-time post at Florida State to assume the position as HGO's co-director. Floyd's first work for Houston was Bilby's Doll (1976) based on the witch hunts in Colonial Massachusetts. Floyd's next Houston Production was Willie Stark (1981), a fictionalized account of Louisiana governor Huey Long based on Robert Penn Warren's novel All the King's Men. In the 1980s Floyd turned his attention to a major overhaul of The Passion of Jonathan Wade, essentially composing an entirely new opera out of the old. The tremendous success accorded to the new Jonathan Wade upon its launch in Houston in 1991 helped to re-establish critical interest in Floyd as a composer. What may be Floyd's valedictory opera, Cold Sassy Tree (2000) was a joint commission from five opera companies including Houston, and was both critically and financially a success.

His non-operatic works are mostly vocal cycles, including The Mystery (1960, written for Phyllis Curtin), Citizen of Paradise (1983, for Suzanne Mentzer) and the cantata A Time to Dance (1994). Floyd has also written a Piano Sonata and several short orchestral pieces. ~ Uncle Dave Lewis, All Music Guide

Discography

Carlisle Floyd: Cold Sassy Tree Buy this CD

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