Composer Margaret Garwood's new opera is based on Nathaniel Hawthorne's classic 'Scarlet Letter'

WHEN MARGARET Garwood began composing operas 50 years ago, atonality dominated in new music, and her style of soaring arias and duets, lush harmony and sheer vocal beauty was considered passe.

Whatever goes around the theory books comes around, though. Garwood, now 83, still composes with that same expressive palette - one composers today strive for but rarely accomplish.

Not that the notes always come easily for Garwood, either.

In January 2002, after four years of work, she had completed just one scene of her fifth opera, based on Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel "The Scarlet Letter." When the Academy of Vocal Arts performed it in a chamber-size orchestration, this dramatic thunderbolt stunned the audience.

For years, Garwood worked daily on the piece with consummate craft and patience - even as she was besieged by requests to finish the opera. Her constant support was her husband Donald Chittum, a professor of world music, theory and many other subjects at the University of the Arts since 1963.

"I'm afraid of commissions, because composers always have to stop before it's finished," Garwood said in a recent interview. "The trouble with music today is too many premature births, works not given their proper time. Composing is a slow process and can't be rushed."

Fortunately for Garwood and a legion of local supporters, a completed "Scarlet Letter" will finally be presented, once again by the Academy of Vocal Arts in a world premiere this weekend.

For AVA's first presentation in the Merriam Theater, the 55-piece orchestra will be led by gifted conductor and vocal coach Richard Raub. The always-inventive Dorothy Danner will direct. And John Packard, a now-famous academy alumnus, performs the role of Roger Chillingworth Friday and Sunday.

Garwood's previous operas include "The Trojan Women," "The Nightingale and the Rose" and a children's opera, "Joringel and the Songflower." She also created an opera based on another famous Hawthorne tale, the exotic "Rappaccini's Daughter."

"While I was taking a graduate program at the University of the Arts," said Garwood, whom everyone calls Peg, "I got involved in Hawthorne and the short story 'Rappaccini's Daughter.' His work resonates with me, expressing the dramatic force involved in the repression of sensualism, which always leads to perversion.

"I wanted to write 'The Scarlet Letter' then, but I didn't think that I was emotionally equipped to do it yet."