Revisiting ‘Elmer Gantry’

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Dan Fleming

When the Florentine Opera’s General Director William Florescu saw the world premiere of Elmer Gantry, he immediately knew what he wanted to do. “I walked up to the composer after the show and said, ‘We’re going to do this in Milwaukee.’ I see a lot of new opera and I hadn’t seen anything that had that impact on me—ever.”

Since its Milwaukee debut in 2010, Elmer Gantry’s recording by the Florentine Opera won two Grammy awards for Best Classical and Best Engineered Recording. Revisiting the work by composer Robert Aldridge, one realizes the extent of its virtues as an opera in the classic sense—not as theater with music but as a hybrid drama using the full potential of the human voice to ignite emotions within the score that would otherwise remain unrealized.    

Elmer Gantry is singularly unhampered by many of the pitfalls of contemporary opera. “It’s accessible and original,” Florescu explains. “Many new operas are original but not accessible, and you can have opera that’s accessible but not original. Elmer Gantry is both.” By touching all bases in a score embellished by moments of Verdian operatic grandeur, Aldridge and librettist Herschel Garfein have produced an appealing work in styles ranging all the way from the infectious melodic beat of a Broadway musical to the more subtle harmonies of Gershwin, Copland or Barber, with some Puccini-like lyricism thrown in for good measure. Yet the music creates its own idiom as a full-bodied operatic achievement with an exciting, richly dramatic and uplifting score.

Based on Sinclair Lewis’ novel, the libretto focused on the love story between the opportunistic huckster Elmer Gantry and the devout evangelist Sharon Falconer in a setting of Southern tent-style revivalism. The compositional milieu is of boisterous early Americana, yet the beautiful score never sounds piecemeal or fragmented. The composers took more than a decade to develop the work and the carefully cultivated result never sounds dissonant or pretentiously avant-garde. Elmer Gantry is first and last a lyric opera. The original gospel interludes give the work a solid, enervating punch. But the melodic beauty of Sharon’s opening first act aria and the tenderness of the second act duet between Elmer and Sharon is what gives Gantry its emotional gravitas whose subtle sophistication straddles satire and sentiment.

Upon revisiting the score one is struck by its immediacy and the rich inventiveness of its melodic pull. It doesn’t sound like an opera, but feels as accessible as an upscale Broadway musical until one picks up on the polyphonic complexity and the full-bodied orchestral magnitude which we have learned to expect in great operas. “It’s not as easy to perform as it sounds,” Florescu says. “The singers have to work hard, even though Elmer Gantry sounds simple and folk-like to the listener.”

A brass band is used in some revival scenes, but the score never loses its arching dramatic unity or its predilection for tragedy. Listening to the CD without reference to the libretto, it becomes apparent that the music remains self-contained and carries its own impact without references to plot specifics.

Sharon and Elmer’s beautiful duets are highlighted by a score whose subtle polyphonies often underplay the sophisticated and powerful harmonics, making the drama all the more compelling. The final act is very impressive. Sharon is torn between her love for Elmer and her religious fervor. Tragically tested in a raging fire that destroys the tabernacle in the great final revival scene, she opts for martyrdom as the music reaches fever pitch in a rousing conclusion to the opera not unlike the dramatic climaxes so favored by Puccini and Verdi.

“It’s not easy to cast,” Florescu says of the new production, starring Craig Verm as Elmer and Katherine Pracht as Sharon. “The roles are tough vocally with lots of range and color. You need performers who can act as well as sing.” Verm has often been cast at the Florentine, most recently as Count Almaviva in The Marriage of Figaro (2013); Pracht previously sang with the Florentine in another newer opera with a Southern setting, Susannah (2012). Rounding out the cast are Jonathan Boyd, Kevin Burdette, Jeffrey Beruan and Alisa Suzanne Jordheim. Frank Kelly directs and Christopher Larkin will conduct the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra.

“The story is 80-plus years old and certainly has resonance today,” Florescu concludes. “Elmer Gantry is not an attack on religion but on hucksterism—on using religion for the wrong purposes, which some are doing today with great gusto. Elmer Gantry feels colloquial in the best sense of the word. People often don’t go to new operas fearing they won’t get the music. This is the perfect first new opera for skeptical audiences.”

 The Florentine Opera performs Elmer Gantry March 13 and 15 at Uihlein Hall of the Marcus Center for the Performing Arts, 929 N. Water St. For tickets visit florentineopera.org.