This past February the expansive space of the Charles Engelhard Court of the Metropolitan Museum of Art hosted four evening performances of the opera The Mother of Us All. This was the second and last partnership of composer Virgil Thomson providing music for a libretto by Gertrude Stein. This was not a partnership in the sense of their previous opera, Four Saints in Three Acts, because Stein died in July of 1946, only a few months after she had sent her libretto to Thomson.
The production was the result of another rich partnership, this one bringing MetLiveArts together with the Juilliard School (for the vocalists) and the New York Philharmonic (for the instrumentalists). Stein’s libretto comes close to requiring a “cast of thousands;” and, to judge by the creative and design team, an equally large mass of individuals was involved in bringing about the performance of the opera itself. Performances took place in the evening because the windows of the Engelhard Court were too vast to be effectively curtained.
Susan B. Anthony (Felicia Moore, right) with Gertrude S. (Libby Sokolowski) (screen shot from the video being discussed)
The basic narrative of Mother of Us All is straightforward. The major character is Susan B. Anthony (soprano Felicia Moore); and the libretto is a chronicle of the women’s suffrage movement that plays fast and loose with the basic historical facts. Anthony is surrounded by a cast that includes those from the distant past (such as President John Adams) and the future (the roles identified as “Gertrude S.” and “Virgil T.”). The text itself is representative of Stein’s delight in wordplay, often taking a phrase and repeating it with a stream of subtle changes in inflection.
Four months ago a video of this production was uploaded to YouTube. The video provided subtitles, which were a significant aid in following Stein’s text. On the basis of the camera angles of the staging, I suspect that those titles may not have been available to the audiences in the Engelhard Court. Even if they were, the staging itself was so cluttered with anarchic imagery that it seems unlikely that anyone at one of those performances would be able to focus on anything. The whole affair emerged as a circus conceived by producers that seemed to have felt great nostalgia for The Living Theatre. The good news is that Moore and many of the other vocalists sang with enough clarity to cut through all of that nonsensical staging. Sadly, the chorus was distributed across the entirety of the Court, meaning that much of the choral work was barely audible.
There is a tendency to dismiss the libretto as Stein’s last gasp of nonsense verse. This seems to have been the opinion of the production team, but even they could not prevent the emergence of semantic clarity that could catch the viewer unawares. This is particularly true of a monologue given to Anthony very early in the second scene of the second act:
Yes but, what is man, what are men, what are they. I do not say that they haven’t kind hearts, if I fall down in a faint, they will rush to pick me up, if my house is on fire, they will rush in to put the fire out and help me, yes they have kind hearts but they are afraid, afraid, they are afraid. They fear women, they fear each other, they fear their neighbor, they fear other countries and then they hearten themselves in their fear by crowding together and following each other, and when they crowd together and follow each other they are brutes, like animals who stampede, and so they have written in the name male into the United States constitution, because they are afraid of black men because they are afraid of women, because they are afraid, afraid. Men are afraid.
Moore’s delivery of that text was, without a doubt, “worth the price of admission” (which was pretty steep for those attending one of the performances).
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