Of Mice and Men: Opera in Three Acts (review)

In my dozen years of record reviewing for Fanfare, I never encountered as much deliberate marking-over of a package as those borne by my review copy of this second Steinbeck-based opera to be released by the Albany label—including, absurdly, the covering-up of its catalog number. I mention this only because in every other respect this production deserves to be called nearly flawless—though some might wish the recording had been done without an audience present. But a few coughs and stage noises, and the final applause, are not enough to cause serious cavils among listeners used to Saturday afternoon radio opera broadcasts.

Of Mice and Men dates from 1970, and thus shortly after John Steinbeck's death. The annotation for the new recording mentions Carlisle Floyd's relative success at creating new operas that achieve not only audience acclaim but also earn revivals—such as the better-known Susannah (1955). Wilfrid Meller's important text on American music, Music in a New Found Land, remarks that only Floyd among younger composers was able to succeed in Susannah at making a "compromise between regional Americana and the box-office appeal of a conservative musical style capable, in the theatre, of Puccinian immediacy." But he adds that "in Floyd's later and larger operas the validity of American myth is replaced by the grandiose intention, and the Puccinian rhetoric becomes the Hollywood gimmick." Presumably he means that assessment to include Of Mice and Men, but he does not mention the later work by name. Pay your money and take your choice—or make up your own mind. But by all means investigate this recording.

It is true that Floyd, born in 1926, hearkens back stylistically to the great generation of mid-century American composers. I hear resonances—if not allusions—to Aaron Copland here, and Leonard Bernstein, and perhaps especially Samuel Barber—all now dead. But Floyd is very much his own man here as well, and the fact that he writes his own librettos is duly emphasized in the album notes. That being the case, we would of course want to see how he deals with an established Steinbeck masterwork. For by 1970 an audience could have been expected to know the play-novella well enough to have resisted major changes in Steinbeck's tidy structure. And yet the same notes credit the source of the surtitles used in the Houston production. Surtitles, for Steinbeck! Even if the live recording does let the orchestra dominate the voices at times, the text is clearly articulated and reasonably faithful to Steinbeck. But that was not always so, for Floyd originally had written a scene in a whore house, presumably to create a better balance of male and female voices overall. It's just as well he changed his mind, for his Curley's Wife is quite a bit of the sleaze, the tease, and the tart—as she is often seen to be. By the way, Her music is appropriately sinuous; Elizabeth Futral's lovely coloratura soprano is a healthy contrast to the otherwise unremitting interplay of tenor and baritone voices. By the way, she very much looks the part, and looks very good at that; she manages to convey her mood of understandable restlessness—even if after just two weeks of marriage.

So we can live without the whore house scene, but note some other Floyd alterations. For one, the composer uses a character called the Ballad Singer whose functions chorally as commentator on the transience of the ranch hand's life; he returns at the ending to replace the soaring...