Falling Up: The Days and Nights of Carlisle Floyd: The Authorized Biography by Thomas Holliday (review)

Thomas Holliday’s biography Falling Up: The Days and Nights of Carlisle Floyd reveals Floyd’s impact on the development of musical life in the United States during the latter half of the twentieth century, particularly in the field of opera. Floyd (b. 1926) has achieved almost stunning success as an opera composer, seeing ten of his operas through to major productions and encouraging younger American composers including Jake Heggie (b. 1961) and Mark Adamo (b. 1962) to tackle the genre. Floyd’s most influential work by far is his 1955 opera Susannah. In 2009, Opera America calculated that Susannah had been performed at least forty-four times since 1990 (See “North American Works Directory,” Opera America: http://www.operaamerica.org/applications/NAWD/index.aspx [accessed 9 January 2015]). Holliday notes that Susannah was thus one of the most performed American operas by professional companies in the United States and Canada, surpassed only by Gian Carlo Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors (1951) and George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess (1935). Yet as Holliday points out, Floyd does not have the name recognition of Menotti or Gershwin, Samuel Barber, or Aaron Copland. Falling Up represents a major attempt to rectify this situation, placing Floyd within the “currents swirling toward a serious American musical theater, neither musical comedy nor Eurocentric grand opera” (p. 129). Through Floyd, Holliday brings into sharper focus an exciting and often overlooked period in American operatic history. An examination of Floyd’s life through his works, Falling Up will hopefully inspire scholars to engage more fully with Floyd’s significance.

Holliday begins with the composer’s itinerant childhood, chronicling how the Floyd family moved regularly, setting up briefly in a number of small South Carolina towns. Floyd’s father worked as a Methodist circuit minister, and a recurring theme throughout Falling Up is Floyd’s troubled relationship with his father and his father’s religious fanaticism. During Floyd’s adolescence, while the family lived in South Carolina, Floyd managed to escape from his father, as well as numerous summer revival meetings, by attending camps or going to Columbia, South Carolina, for piano lessons.

By the time Floyd had completed high school, reports Holliday, his talent at the piano was undeniable. He attended Con verse College (in Spartanburg) on a piano scholarship, studying with pianist– composer Ernst Bacon (1898–1990). Holliday writes that “Bacon’s espousal of American causes,” as evinced by his music play in two acts, A Tree on the Plains (1942), “had drawn [Floyd] to Converse” (p. 58). Yet Floyd initially dedicated himself to piano study. He also excelled in his English courses, submitting several short fiction pieces to college publications; his early literary interests may be linked to his longstanding preference for writing his own librettos.

When Bacon moved to Syracuse University in 1945, Floyd followed, completing his bachelor’s degree at Syracuse the following year. Upon graduation, Floyd landed a summer instructorship at Florida State University (FSU), teaching, in addition to piano, theory and keyboard harmony. In 1949, he returned to Syracuse for his master’s degree, studying piano under Lionel Nowak, yet he continually gravitated toward composition, relying on Bacon for guidance. On 2 May 1949, Floyd’s one-act opera Slow Dusk received its premiere at Syracuse’s Crouse College Auditorium. Floyd then returned to FSU, continuing to compose and to work as an instructor of piano.

In 1953, Floyd began composing Susannah, the opera that launched his career as a composer. Holliday’s contextual analysis reveals how Susannah may have helped Floyd to reconcile with the overzealous preachers of his childhood as well as the witch hunts of the McCarthy era. An adaptation of the apocryphal tale of Susanna and the Elders, Floyd’s opera revolves around the plight of eighteen-year-old Susannah Polk. When the...