The Scarlet Libretto

Title Page, Copyright, Dedication, Preface

The Scarlet Libretto “This page intentionally left blank”. The Scarlet Libretto Text for Lori Laitman's opera, The Scarlet Letter, Based on the novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne David Mason Red Hen Press | Pasadena, CA The Scarlet Libretto Copyright © 2012 David Mason All rights reserved No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of both the publisher and the copyright owner. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Laitman, Lori, 1955– [Scarlet letter. Libretto] The scarlet libretto / David Mason.—1st ed. p. cm. Libretto for the opera The scarlet letter composed by Lori Laitman. ISBN 978-1-59709-170-1 1. Operas—Librettos. I. Mason, David, 1954- lbt II. Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 1804–1864. Scarlet letter. III. Title. ML50.L196S33 2012 782.1’0268—dc23 2011028576 The Los Angeles County Arts Commission, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs partially support Red Hen Press. First Edition Published by Red Hen www.redhen.org This book is for my friend the great composer Lori Laitman With speechless love “This page intentionally left blank”. vii Preface 1. The Story Writing in The New York Review of Books, the late Alfred Kazin asked, “Why is there no opera of The Scarlet Letter?” His essay was later included in a new edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic novel (1850), perhaps one of the most widely read and admired works of the nineteenth century. For Kazin, the operatic properties of the book were owed in part to its extraordinary structural clarity: “The novel opens on a scene, ‘The Prison-Door,’ that is so dramatic in its starkness that one half expects to hear the audience burst into applause.” Kazin was right about structure, wrong about music history. Scarlet had been turned into an opera by Walter Damrosch in 1896. But Damrosch, a composer and conductor of genuine stature, made the mistake of imposing Wagnerian ponderousness on Hawthorne. He may have missed a particularly American flavor to the story. His librettist, Hawthorne’s son-in-law, the poet and journalist George Parsons Lathrop, left out a major character, Hester Prynne’s illegitimate daughter, Pearl, so the story lost a key emotional complication. Others have since adapted The Scarlet Letter to the stage—it is, after all, one of the most commonly assigned books for high school students in America—but I hope readers will feel that the present libretto has its own merits as verse drama. Of course, no opera libretto really has its meaning on the page, where it cries out for music and performance. But friends have convinced me that this text contains pleasures of its own, as well as in conjunction with the glorious music of composer Lori Laitman, so I have agreed to publish it in book form. When Lori and I cast about for a story on which to base our first opera, we considered a number of modern novels, knowing the rights to them might be costly to obtain. The Scarlet Letter was attractive in part because we could get it for free. Re-reading the book, though, we could see immediately that Kazin was right. The prose might be rather dense for some modern readers, but the lineaments of the story were simple, clear, and charged with emotional power, as well as significant cultural implications that kept the story relevant in our time. The opening establishes an individual, Hester, in stark contrast to her community, and we can see this in the three levels of the setting. On the ground level we have the jail, the Puritan crowd, the incongruous rose bush. High above we have the balcony where elders and ministers stand in judgment. And between them, mounted by Hester with a baby in her arms, is the scaffold, the focus of guilt viii and punishment. As Hester is interrogated from above, gawked at from below, we see at once how primordially strong she is for refusing to divulge her lover’s name. If we know the story, we also know that her lover is one of her accusers, and some part of him might be begging to be convicted even as he fears such a revelation. Arthur Dimmesdale, the pale young minister, is in the...