It’s good to remember, at moments like the present one, that our nation has survived some seriously divisive periods in the past. Take the late 1940s and early 1950s, when Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn came close to dragging the entire government into a paranoid black hole of their own vindictive creation. Or, going back even further, to the colonial period, take the deadly year of 1692, when 19 people were executed by hanging after being found guilty of witchcraft by the courts of the Province of Massachusetts Bay.
If you are playwright Arthur Miller, you take both, holding McCarthyism up to the light shed by the sordid spectacle of the Salem Witch Trials as he did in The Crucible. This weekend, Opera Santa Barbara (OSB) will present the lesser-known but equally fascinating opera version of Miller’s masterpiece. American composer Robert Ward wrote the opera in 1962 under the watchful eye of the playwright himself, yet with enough freedom to craft a distinctive treatment that’s worthy of a consistent presence in the 21st-century performing repertoire.
Coming in well under two hours long, and with an astounding 14 named roles, Ward’s Crucible is, as operas go, action-packed. “There’s no filler,” asserted OSB’s general director and maestro, Kostis Protopapas. “It’s a very theatrical piece, and it demands detailed interpretations from the entire cast.” Its chief strength, according to Protopapas, is “the setting of the text — the pacing is very good.” This is the result both of Miller’s understanding that an operatic treatment would demand significant cuts — it takes longer to sing lines than to say them — and of the degree to which a musical-theater situation suits the material, which is full of conflicting, overlapping voices. If there’s one advantage the opera has over the dramatic stage, it’s the fact that in opera, overlapping dialogue is the rule rather than the exception.