Reviewers were not kind after the world premiere of Jennifer Higdon's opera at Santa Fe in 2015. Zachary Wolfe in the New York Times gave the work an especially damning treatment, decrying what he considered the composer's inability to summon the proper feeling for a nineteenth-century American piece and the librettist's inability to accommodate the novel's unusual narrative structure.Footnote 1 I would like to champion this work—and specifically this recording—not because it is written by Jennifer Higdon, but because it is a superb interpretation of a sublime opera featuring a superlative cast and corps of musicians. Previous reviewers of the operatic premiere have focused on the opera's flaws; I argue, however, that much exists to admire within this two-act piece.
Higdon composed Cold Mountain on a commission from Santa Fe Opera in collaboration with Opera Company of Philadelphia, Minnesota Opera, and North Carolina Opera. When librettist Gene Scheer suggested Cold Mountain, Higdon immediately felt a resonance with Charles Frazier's novel because of her roots as a Tennessee native. She remembered growing up just “60 miles as the crow flies” from the real Cold Mountain and having an innate sense for the “speech patterns of the characters.”Footnote 2 While Higdon grounds the opera solidly in her self-professed “American Compositional School” style, she does not employ the extended techniques featured more prominently in works such as her violin concerto. Rather, Cold Mountain’s virtuosity stems from a heightened human connection achieved through her scoring of dialogue, ensemble orchestration, and character relationships.
Act 1 of this Civil War–era opera opens with the introduction of Teague, a ruthless hunter of deserters. Inman, a soldier for the Confederacy, has deserted and set off in search of his beloved, the once-affluent Ada. As Inman weaves his way along a somewhat Homeric journey— avoiding both starvation and men such as Teague—Ada begins a new life on Black Cove Farm. While Ada has few survival skills herself, she soon encounters Ruby, a young mountain woman who teaches her the basics of rural life. In act 2, Lucinda, an escaped slave, searches the unconscious Inman's pockets. When he awakens, she frees him, allowing him to continue on his trek to find Ada. Teague reappears at Black Cove Farm with a paper containing names of deserters including Stobrod, Ruby's father. Teague kills Stobrod, leaving Ruby and Ada to search the woods for Inman. Finally, Ada encounters Inman and they experience an ecstatic reunion, but that morning of shared memories will be their last. In an epilogue, Ada holds her child nine years later.
What is the primary compositional problem to be solved in writing an opera such as Cold Mountain? The composer and librettist must write love scenes for lovers who are never in the same room and hate scenes for enemies who never meet face to face. What Higdon and Scheer achieve through the particular use of ensembles and choruses in the piece is a brilliant unity that functions as a kind of narrative adhesive. Higdon's opera flips the operatic paradigm on its head by subverting its hegemonic norms and empowering the collaborative aspects of staged classical vocal works. For example, Higdon's opera displays her distinct talent for operatic dialogue. The act 1, scene 3 exchange between Ada and Inman—a memory of their first meeting—occurs in flashback. The dialogue is underscored not only by strings and winds, but also by the audience's laughter when Ada begins to stutter at Inman's advances in spite of her own self-confident demeanor. She has babbled and injected a significant amount of small talk, but when she drops her fan, she is unable to continue her shallow stream of words: “Thank you. (Stuttering) I … I am … I mean. …” Inman replies, “Out of bullets?” [audience laughter] And Ada manages, “I think it would show an amplitude of spirit/If you were to say something, anything right now” (track 32). [more audience laughter] Higdon's setting of this dialogue emphasizes natural speech patterns and employs a collo voce technique usually saved for recitative—reminiscent of Puccini or, closer to home, Gian Carlo Menotti or Tobias Picker. Inman, sung by baritone Nathan Gunn, and Ada, mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard, also deserve much praise for their distinct vocal characterizations.
Much of the dialogue and ensemble work maintains this clarity of verbal rhythm, as do choral numbers such as “Our Beautiful Country” and “Tell Her.” Conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya had a significant task before him; moments such as Inman's encounter with the war widow Sara in act 2, scene 5 require extraordinary coherence within the ensemble. Indeed, throughout the opera, Harth-Bedoya creates a deep connection between orchestra and singers that is rare in recordings of new operas and indicative of a commitment to this striking work.
In sum, reviewers who chose to exercise their displeasure with this American opera may not have considered that the operatic paradigm can be disrupted by an equality of treatment among ensemble, aria, and choral moments within the piece. From the perspective of pedagogy, the recording provides an opportunity to examine U.S. Civil War history from a multivalent point of view (novel, operatic work, live recording) that could be applicable within a U.S. music survey, opera history course, or contemporary music course, to name just a few. The two-CD set, containing the libretto, statements from the composer, librettist, and author, and a plot summary, provides ample material for study as well as for guided listening. Cold Mountain is a groundbreaking work that engages with American historical themes while carving a path for new conceptions of operatic ensemble writing.
