Cold Sassy Tree
[Excerpt from the script of Operatalk with Nick Reveles]

[Production pictures may be found by clicking on Music from Cold Sassy Tree]
In 1984, a book about life in a small, rural town in Georgia at the turn of the twentieth century arrived at book stores all over the country, and within a short period of time Cold Sassy Tree captured the imaginations of millions of readers. The author, Olive Ann Burns, was surprised by its popularity and plotted a sequel, Leaving Cold Sassy, but succumbed to cancer before she was able to finish it. Reading the book one’s first thought might not be how this charming, sentimental tale could be turned into an opera. But upon reading a truly interesting, gripping tale, that is indeed every opera composer’s first thought, and thank goodness for that because eminent American composer Carlisle Floyd has taken this novel and turned it into one of the most refreshing and beautiful operas written in a very long time.

Carlisle Floyd was born in Latta, South Carolina in 1926, the son of a Methodist minister who was assigned to several small South Carolina towns during his ministerial career. The itinerant nature of his childhood was an inspiration to his later work, considering that most of his operas deal with rural communities and the kind of eccentric ‘characters’ that often appear in stories about the deep South. He studied as a pianist, graduating from Syracuse University in 1946 and taking a post on the piano faculty of Florida State University in Tallahassee in 1947 where he remained for almost 30 years. He returned to Syracuse for a master’s degree in piano and while there took an interest in composition. It was in Syracuse that his first opera, Slow Dusk, was performed. A second work, written for Tallahassee, was withdrawn by the composer after one performance but the next work was Susannah, a re-casting of the biblical story of Susannah and the Elders placed in Appalachian Mountains.

Susannah was a great success, not only in Tallahassee at Florida State but in New York, where the enterprising and then young New York City Opera Company staged it to great acclaim. It won the New York Music Critics’ Circle Award and a Guggenheim fellowship for the composer, among many other awards. It was chosen to represent the United States at the Brussels World’s Fair in 1958 and ultimately became Floyd’s signature work, gaining entry into the repertory of almost every professional opera company in the country. It’s engaging, folk-like melodies, approachable harmonies and dramatic story combine to make it a work that is immediately effective on even the most conservative opera audiences. And although it was written nearly fifty years ago, it retains a freshness that is remarkable.

Floyd’s other works for the stage include operatic settings of Emily Brontė’s Wuthering Heights, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men and Robert Penn Warren’s novel All the King’s Men. Other operas include The Passion of Jonathan Wade, The Sojourner and Mollie Sinclair and Bilby’s Doll. In all of the these operas there is a penchant for lyric melodic writing and strong dramatic situations within a harmonic context that never gave in to the purely abstract, dissonant and avant garde attitude typical of operatic composers in the 1960s and 70s. It should be said at this point that Floyd, being a man of the theatre with very definite ideas about what does and does not work on a stage, has consistently been his own librettist, writing the texts and lyrics for these operas as if they were straight plays first and operas second. His careful work as a wordsmith pays off emotionally in all of these works which connect with audiences in ways that other contemporary operas do not.

San Diego Opera has had a long and distinguished relationship with Mr. Floyd and his operas, having presented Susannah in 1981, The Passion of Jonathan Wade in 1991 and 1996, and Of Mice and Men in 1999. I noticed something interesting about the audience during performances of the opera Of Mice and Men, and that is that despite our experience with many contemporary operas, virtually no one left after the first intermission. Very often with relatively new works like this, people find the musical language impenetrable, difficult to listen to. That was not the case with this wonderful opera simply because the drama was so gripping and so theatrically ‘right’ that no one even considered leaving. You know that a new opera has connected with an audience when you observe that phenomenon. I observed the same thing when I attended a performance of Cold Sassy Tree in Houston during its world premiere run at Houston Grand Opera. Everyone was riveted, the audience drawn to the wonderfully tender, sometimes funny-sometimes sad tale of these delightful characters in this ‘slice of life’ opera about a small town in Georgia.

The story of the opera centers around life in the town of Cold Sassy Tree in the year 1900. Will Tweedy, the young man who narrates the story, tells us about his grandfather Rucker Lattimore, the owner of Cold Sassy’s only general store. Mrs. Lattimore has only just died three weeks before and Rucker has shocked the town and his family by proposing marriage to Love Simpson, one of the clerks in his store and a woman young enough to be his daughter! The proposal is merely a business arrangement, someone to cook, clean and keep house for him, until he begins to realize that he is actually falling in love with her. In a scene as touching as anything in the operatic repertoire, he acknowledges his love to her, she shares a painful secret from her past, and instead of turning away from her he embraces her and invites her, in his words, “Then don’t be comp’ny no more: Come, come share my room with me.” (See a more full synopsis on the San Diego Opera website.)

A few words are in order about the life and writing career of Olive Ann Burns. She was born in 1924 on land once cultivated by her great-great-grandfather in Banks County, Georgia to William Arnold Burns, the man whom she later used as a model for Will Tweedy, and Ruby Celestia Hight, whom Olive was to turn into Sanna Klein in the unfinished sequel to Cold Sassy Tree, Leaving Cold Sassy. There were four children in the family, three sisters and a brother who all arrived into the family about a year apart from each other. Life for a family of six during the Depression in rural Georgia was difficult, and at one point the Burns’ were forced to leave the family farm and move to the larger town of Commerce where they lived with relatives and tried to make ends meet. It was Commerce that Olive Ann used as a model for the town of Cold Sassy Tree.

Olive Ann Burns began keeping a diary when she was nine, but it wasn’t until high school that she began to write in earnest. In her freshman year, during an exercise of writing similes and presented with the word “violin”, she wrote “A violin sounds like a refined sawmill.” She often said later that it was these seven words that launched her into writing. In college at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill she wanted to major exclusively in journalism, but ever the practical one, she decided on a double major in journalism and education just in case she wasn’t able to get a job writing. By the time of her graduation in 1946 her parents were living in Atlanta and she went there to live with them and try to make her living as a writer. She eventually got a position as a staff writer with the Atlanta Journal Sunday Magazine. Here she honed her writing skills under astute direction of the founding editor Angus Perkerson, the man who had hired Margaret Mitchell, author of Gone With the Wind, in 1922 for the same position. It was here that she learned to edit herself and how to organize a story, but that was a far cry from writing a successful novel.

Olive Ann remained with the magazine for ten years, followed by a stint as the advice columnist for the newspaper. By this time she had married her colleague Andy Sparks who had become Perkerson’s successor and had begun to have a family, so she relished the opportunity as a columnist to write at home. She joined one of the many writer’s groups that had sprung up in the South following the success of Margaret Mitchell’s work, a group called the Plot Club. Few of the members ever expected Ms. Burns to actually produce something especially since all the other writers were, indeed, published. But just before the death of her mother in the 1970s she began to write down her mother’s memories of Commerce, Georgia, and then her father’s family history and slowly but surely the story that was to become Cold Sassy Tree began to emerge.

It took her nearly ten years of painstaking writing, re-writing and editing to complete the book, first at a typewriter and then behind the screen of a computer, and during that time she endured the first of many bouts with cancer and chemotherapy treatments. But the book was finally finished, picked up by the publisher Ticknor and Fields, and released in October 1984. The release of the book was a phenomenon in the South, with rave reviews coming in from New York and Atlanta and readers buying multiple copies to give to friends.

According to her editor, Katrina Kenison, Olive Ann Burns was a talkative, fascinating, endlessly curious woman with a wonderful sense of humor and a kind of wisdom that can only come from good common sense, all the qualities that make the novel great. Even when she was debilitated by the cancer and congestive heart failure that finally took her in the summer of 1990 she was always positive, ready with a story or an anecdote, and working feverishly on the sequel to Cold Sassy Tree which remained unfinished at her death. The literary quality of Cold Sassy Tree has never been argued, and critics have placed it within a pantheon of Southern stories that include Huckleberry Finn, To Kill A Mockingbird, Gone With The Wind, Tobacco Road and The Color Purple. Before her death Olive Ann Burns was delighted that the book had been chosen by the American Library Association and the New York Public Library to be on their list of books recommended for teenagers. She exclaimed, “The New York list had my name right there between Emily Brontė and Willa Cather! Think of that!”

Because Cold Sassy Tree is a new opera, there is as yet no recording of the piece so audiences are pretty much on their own as far as preparing to see the production. So the question comes, as it often does from our viewers, how do I prepare for the experience of seeing this opera? Well, I’m not sure one needs to prepare to see this opera. It’s immediately accessible both in terms of its story and its music which is very tuneful, lyrical and passionate (think Puccini with a Southern accent!). What one can do is, of course, read the book upon which the opera is based. It is out in a relatively inexpensive paperback version and its an easy read. As for the music, there are a number of recordings now available of the works of Carlisle Floyd, most importantly a recent recording of his signature piece, Susannah, with Cheryl Studer, Jerry Hadley and Samuel Ramey, conducted by Kent Nagano. Older recordings of some of his other operas have recently been made available: Markheim, based on a story by Robert Louis Stevenson, The Sojourner and Mollie Sinclair, and the old, classic recording of Susannah with Phyllis Curtin and Norman Treigle. Some of these older recordings have been released on VAI Audio which can be difficult to find. Your best bet will be to log onto the Internet and order them through Amazon or some other CD service. Outside of actually having a recording of Cold Sassy Tree, the next best thing is to become familiar with the composer’s style through his other works that are available in recorded form.