Music Lover’s Almanac: March 18
ON THIS DATE one hundred years ago – American opera gained home-court advantage.
Born in Newton, Mass., in 1871, Frederick Shepherd Converse was a quick study on the piano who quickly captured that most Massachusetts of ambitions: a Harvard diploma. By the turn of the century, the protégé of New England School composers John Knowles Paine and George Chadwick distinguished himself through a European-styled mastery of orchestration and poetic temperament. His life’s work included a composition for full orchestra, “Endymion's Narrative, After Keats” (1901), a vocal solo from Keats, “La belle dame sans merci” (1902), and several symphonic poems based on Whitman, including his best-remembered work, “The Mystic Trumpeter” (1904).
Poetry merged with the fantastical and pseudo-Christian for Converse in 1906 when he completed his first opera, “The Pipe of Desire.” Telling the story of a peasant whose disbelief in the mystical powers of an elven king’s pipe results in a delirium that claims the life of his fiancée and provides a lesson on both forgiveness and environmental conservation, it opened at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York on March 18, 1910, in an intrepid double-bill with “Pagliacci.” “For Mr. Converse’s opera is short,” reported The New York Times on March 19, “being in one act and playing but little over an hour.”
The performance marked the first time an American opera was presented at the Met, and the first time an opera in English was offered in the Met’s regular season. “The performance was, in fact, and excellent one,” said the Times, “carried through with real devotion by all who were concerned in it…Everything, in fact, had been done for the opera to set it forth in the most advantageous way.” But the debut was far from a rave success. The Times, ever quick to point out facts, noted that “the events that are set forth in ‘The Pipe of Desire’ are not clearly intelligible nor do they result in carrying the listener’s interest on from one point to the next. There is, in fact, a great dearth of action upon the stage of any dramatic sort.”
Running for three performances under the baton of Alfred Hertz, the Met production had little effect on Converse himself. He founded the short-lived Boston Opera Company and oversaw stagings of both his first opera and its more successful successor, “The Sacrifice” (1911); two other Converse operas remain unperformed. He served as a bandmaster in WWI and worked as instructor and dean of faculty at the New England Conservatory of Music, faithful to his native Massachusetts until his death at home in Westwood in 1940.
There are no comments for this entry.