Carlisle Floyd

Carlisle Floyd (b. 1926) began his undergraduate studies in piano performance at Converse College in his home state of South Carolina in 1943, but he finished them in New York in 1946, following his principle teacher, Ernst Bacon, to Syracuse University when Pulitzer-prize winning composer and pianist accepted a position there. Floyd joined the piano faculty at Florida State University in 1947, while pursuing his master’s degree at Syracuse University, completed in 1949. At FSU he began composing distinctly American operas on his own librettos, regarding them as music dramas rather than as operas in a more traditional sense. At the 1955 world premiere in Tallahassee of his second opera, Susannah, Floyd received an honorary doctorate from FSU, and in 1983 he was awarded another doctorate from Dickinson College. Floyd’s many other honors include awards from the National Opera Institute, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he also received a Medal of Arts from the White House in 2004.

Following its New York premiere, Susannah won the 1956 New York Music Critics Circle Award for Best New Opera, and it was selected to represent American music and culture at the 1958 World’s Fair, in Brussels. The two-act work is often cited as the second-most frequently staged American opera, after Porgy and Bess—but it is unlikely that these counts include Menotti’s perennial, one-act Christmas opera, Amahl and the Night Visitors, which receives numerous productions each December.

Inspired by the Apocryphal story of Susannah and the Elders, Floyd’s McCarthy-era drama tells the tragic tale of a young girl whose life is ruined by the deceitful gossip spread by the women in her church, who are jealous of Susannah's beauty and the attention the menfolk pay her. Her problem is compounded by the guilt of the Church Elders, manifested as outrage, when they discover her bathing in a secluded stream. Encouraged by the false rumors of her loose morals, a travelling preacher, Olin Blitch, forces himself on Susannah. When he discovers that Susannah was indeed an innocent, Blitch is overcome with remorse and tries to convince the townspeople to “forgive” her. Of course they will not, as it would mean they must admit to their own sins of envy and lust. When Susannah’s brother discovers what has happened, he shoots and kills Blitch, and then disappears, never to return—and Susannah’s fate as an embittered outcast is sealed.

Floyd’s musical palate is heavily colored by the hymnody, folk music, and fiddle tunes indigenous to the opera’s rural Tennessee setting, and its backwoods feeling is reinforced by the use of regional dialect. In the soaring 2nd-Act aria, The Trees on the Mountain, Susannah sings a melancholy song her deceased mother taught her, that compares the bleak isolation of a young woman with the harshness of impending winter. The song obviously mirrors Susannah's own situation, and it becomes the musical focal point of the opera. Despite the wholly operatic technique the aria demands of the heroine, Floyd's original lyrics and music achieve the direct, emotional impact of an Appalachian folksong.