Rather than training young singers for standard repertoire, the academy is corralling all its resources for the three-act, 19-character opera, and not for its small Spruce Street headquarters but for the 1,800-seat Merriam Theater on Broad Street, where The Scarlet Letter has three performances Friday through Sunday. It's a project that simultaneously makes all the sense in the world, and none whatsoever.
Nathaniel Hawthorne's classic novel, one of the literary cornerstones of public-school education, has many obvious ingredients for grand opera - a story of adulterous love repressed by 17th-century Boston Puritans. In fact, at least a dozen operas (and even a rock opera) have dramatized the plight of Hester Prynne and her illegitimate daughter, Pearl, though without much staying power.
AVA coach/conductor Richard Raub believes this one will be different. Recently, he told the audience at a preview performance, "This is one for the repertoire." Indeed, Mark Adamo's Little Women - another opera based on an American classic and written in a straightforward tonal style not unlike Garwood's - is widely performed and a particular favorite with student groups and chamber opera companies.
Yet the cost of composing The Scarlet Letter was close to overwhelming. Though Garwood has written four other operas over the years (most significantly Rappaccini's Daughter, which had a successful 1983 premiere by the now-defunct Pennsylvania Opera Theater), sustaining the long-haul creative effort required by any major work is tough at any age. Both Jean Sibelius and George Rochberg were unable to finish their final symphonies, the latter explaining that being a composer "requires an iron stomach."
Garwood knows what he meant. But The Scarlet Letter maintained a relentless hold over her: "It's strange how it kept calling me, saying, 'You will do this.' And I gave in. . . .
