Susannah

About This Event

Carlisle Floyd wrote Susannah's libretto and score himself while teaching piano at Florida State University, adapting the apocryphal story of Susanna and the Elders and relocating it to a fictional Appalachian mountain town, New Hope Valley, Tennessee — an 18-year-old is spied on bathing by the town's elders, falsely branded a sinner, and turned on by the entire community. It premiered at FSU in February 1955.

Floyd wrote it in 1953, at the height of the McCarthy era, and the parallel isn't subtle once you know to look for it: a community destroying an innocent person's reputation on manufactured accusations, driven by people in power protecting their own hypocrisy. The score leans on Appalachian folk melody and Protestant hymn tunes rather than anything resembling the European grand-opera tradition, which is part of why it still reads as a distinctly American opera.

It won the New York Music Critics Circle Award for Best New Opera in 1956 and represented American music at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair. This is the Lyric's first Susannah since 2002, with Gabriella Reyes in the title role and company debuts from Ryan Speedo Green and Matthew Cairns.