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  • A New Voice for Hester Prynne
  • Christopher Leise (bio)
The Scarlet Libretto
David Mason
Red Hen Press
www.redhen.org
64Pages; Print, $16.95

From Kathy Acker's and Paul Auster's postmodernist fictions, to Suzan-Lori Parks's and Naomi Iizuka's envelope-pushing plays, and the 2010 teeny-bopper Emma Stone vehicle, Easy A, it might seem a stretch to once more bring new light to Hawthorne's best-known novel. Already the twenty-first century has seen at least two Scarlet Letter operas composed and performed. But for poet David Mason and composer Lori Laitman, the 1850 narrative about seventeenth-century Massachusetts proved irresistibly dramatic and urgently relevant for reinvention in their own vision. Under the stage direction of Beth Greenberg and the Opera Colorado, the production debuted in four performances on May 7, 10, 13, and 15, 2016. A live recording of one performance was recently released on the Naxos label.

David Mason's The Scarlet Libretto lands as a fresh and penetrating distillation of its nineteenth-century inspiration. Throughout, Mason honors his source by making it his own poem, in much the same way Hawthorne dramatically restaged the life of the legendary Ann Hutchinson. Rendering the Bible as both Massachusetts's charter and its most effective weapon, Mason's libretto asks questions about how communities establish the terms of in-group and out-group belonging.

Despite the narrative's near-ideal qualities for dramatic adaptation, one almost has to read against the formal constraints that operatic measure imposes on Mason's verse to appreciate his poetic accomplishments. Writing in briskly lineated couplets and not recalling, say, Longfellow's closet plays or Whittier's more saccharine fireside poems posed a serious challenge. Neither does Hawthorne's prose lend itself to projection into a large hall, as a libretto both complements and competes with the music in performance. Despite Mason's necessary commitment to an idiom singable for performers and hearable for audiences, for which he needlessly apologizes in his preface, Hawthorne's nineteenth-century imitation of seventeenth-century expression stands up remarkably well.

The Scarlet Libretto's most memorable attributes manifest in its diction and subtle rhyme strategy. At its opening (for the sake of brevity, Mason excluded "The Custom-House"), unnamed common townspeople move quickly into a seductive yet domineering relationship with their audience. "Mark how the town has taken form," intones a sailor; "Mark how the will of God has farmed from Governor to lowest worm," a farmer replies. While the first seven lines eschew any rhyme-scheme, the singers fall into a pattern of couplets and triplets immediately upon the sailor's command that the audience mark the town's form.

The singers here invoke the material components of a sign itself, both aural and visual, updating Hawthorne's investment in the visual language of chivalry invoked in the novel's final line (as adapted from Marvell's "The Unfortunate Lover"). While celebrating the evidence of their community's coherence and the perceived evidence of God's sanction, nevertheless the would-be loving community order one another into certain forms of action. Continuing to develop the suspicious tone of an as-yet unnamed Salem, Goodwife 1 describes "The winter's past, the rose in bloom. / Now sunlight has dispelled the gloom / though forest shadows crowd our homes." An astute reader of his muse, Mason casts his singer in a suspicious color: throughout Hawthorne's ouvre, most readers of this publication will surely recognize, he trumpets the virtues of shade, shadow, moonlight, and reflection. To the visual component of ironic skepticism—the Goodwife's preference for pure light and mistrust of blended light with dark, contra Hawthorne—Mason adds a key slant rhyme. Something about these homes clangs against its own formal precedent, a form that the audience has already been commanded to mark within the first six lines.

Adaptation, of course, necessitates interpretation, but Mason's lyrical and thematic choices feel almost a natural consequence of reshaping The Scarlet Letter to an opera's stage. Perhaps this reason explains how Mason's published text survived its staging with only negligible changes. Modifying Hester's voice, opera makes possible as much...

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