KANSAS CITY, MO.
For as commemoration ceremonies a couple of weeks ago in Chatham recalled, it was 150 years ago, in May 1858, that Brown, the most controversial figure in the pre- Civil War abolition movement, organized a "convention" in the small Ontario town, to which he subsequently – personally – smuggled a dozen runaway slaves from across the international border.
Months later he was dead, hanged by government order for leading an abortive raid on a military arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Va., an event portrayed on stage this month by Lyric Opera of Kansas City in its world premiere production of Kirke Mechem's three-act opera John Brown.
The son of a professional historian, the Kansas-born Mechem thought about and worked on his opera literally for decades and, although he insists it is not a history lesson, I beg to differ. His fidelity to the essentials of the abolitionist's gripping story constitutes his opera's greatest strength. John Brown emerges as a zealot, but not as the crazed terrorist portrayed by the Canadian actor Raymond Massey in a sensationalized film biography of decades past.
It was the torching of the town of Lawrence in free state Kansas by rabble rousers from across the border in pro-slavery Missouri in 1856, the opera reminds us, that radicalized Brown to take violent retaliatory action and there are historians now who regard this event, rather than the firing on Fort Sumter in Charleston harbour, as the real beginning of the American Civil War.
Mechem's libretto (he wrote the opera's words as well as its music) similarly reminds us of Brown's association with such leading contemporaries as the writer Ralph Waldo Emerson and "the coloured people's unofficial president," Frederick Douglass, using some of their actual words as well as Brown's in his text.
Like Linda Haugen in her opera Pocahontas for the Virginia Arts Festival last year, he also incorporates snatches of hymns and songs of the period into his accessibly tonal score, which is most impressive in its big choral numbers (a Mechem specialty).
An opera for the ages? Probably not, given the lack of melodic distinction in much of the solo vocal writing.
An appropriate opera for Kansas City? Emphatically yes, as a timely means of capping Lyric Opera's 50th anniversary season.
With a budget in the $5 million range, Lyric is a regional company of surprising ambition, long limited, like Toronto's Canadian Opera Company, by residence in a restrictive performance facility, and now preparing to move in two or three years into a new 1,800-seat opera house, currently under construction as part of the multi-million-dollar Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts.
Pouring $900,000 into John Brown represented a substantial undertaking for this smallish, second-tier company but the result is a production worthy of its subject, conventionally directed by Kristine McIntyre and ably conducted by company artistic director Ward Holmquist, with a cast headed by two powerful singing actors, baritone Donnie Ray Albert as Frederick Douglass and especially James Maddalena, whose John Brown evolves as a stern, compassionate, ultimately sympathetic figure of much complexity.
Part of the reason John Brown resonates so strongly in Kansas City – audiences have given it standing ovations – relates to the opera's telling of a locally relevant story. The title character still appears in school textbooks and debates continue about the morality of Brown's actions in the first year in which an African-American may actually win election to the White House. The lesson for other opera companies is obvious. If you want the public to respond to your art form, it helps to make the opera's story their own.
