10 Fun Facts about Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah

Carlisle Floyd’s opera Susannah is set in America’s Appalachia, and is based on the Biblical tale of Susannah and the Elders, accepted by Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches as an episode from the Book of Daniel, but still a contested part of the Apocrypha by Protestant faiths. The tension between belief and doubt, represented in the acceptance of the source story, also fuels the opera.  

54 years separate Giuseppe Verdi’s 1839 commission from Milan’s fabled La Scala, Oberto, and his last, Falstaff, in 1893. This is the only association between a major composer and an opera company that surpasses Carlisle Floyd’s with Houston Grand Opera, which was a constant 49-year association that included five commissioned operas and his co-founding, with David Gockley, of the company’s Butler Studio in 1977. Carlisle’s influence over HGO during that formative half-century is a unique component of the company’s successful trajectory, which is celebrated in this year of Carlisle’s centenary.

Carlisle Floyd was born on June 11, 1926, and many notable people share his birth year: Alan Greenspan, Jerry Lewis, Queen Elizabeth II, Marilyn Monroe (how amazing that Monroe and Britain’s longest serving monarch were born within weeks of each other!), Tony Bennett, Fidel Castro, Dame Joan Sutherland, and, two men still living at the time of writing set to celebrate their centenaries this year: Mel Brooks and Sir David Attenborough.

George Frideric Handel, the composer of Messiah, also composed a version of Susanna, famous in his own time, though Handel’s oratorio ends happily for Susanna and unhappily for the elders, who are sentenced to death for lying about her. Floyd’s Susannah ends perhaps more realistically, with the hypocritical elders unpunished and the title character forced into madness. Handel’s Susanna is a work of unearthly beauty, largely because of the extended aria “Crystal springs in murmurs flowing,” one of the most devastatingly beautiful of all Baroque arias. Floyd’s opera has two great arias about nature, “Ain’t it a pretty night?” and “The trees on the mountains.” 

Besides the title character, the opera’s other major role is the circuit-riding evangelist Olin Blitch, who was a Floyd addition to the Biblical story, and was heavily influenced by Sinclair Lewis’s Elmer Gantry, a searing satirical novel from 1927 about a reverend who becomes a major moral force despite privately engaging in all of the behaviors he publicly condemns from the pulpit. In 1960, Burt Lancaster won an Academy Award for Best Actor for playing Elmer Gantry.

The story of Susanna and the Elders has been depicted countless times in art, most famously by Tintoretto, Rubens, and Rembrandt, each of whom represents the male gaze in judgment of Susanna. The Spanish painter Pablo Picasso painted his version with the bathing Susanna entirely filling the frame, while the moralizing elders are depicted only in paintings-within-paintings behind her. It can be seen in the Picasso Museum in Málaga.

As a Biblical story, modernized and re-told, the opera Susannah is one of many such stories, such as:

John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, which retells the Cain and Abel parable in the 20th-century American West.

Andrew Lloyd Weber’s musical, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, which retells a story from the Book of Genesis.

The Diaries of Adam and Eve by Mark Twain, a delightful updating of the Biblical creation story, which in turn became part of a wonderful Jerry Bock musical, The Apple Tree.

The Red Tent, a novel by Anita Diamant that reimagines the story of Dinah in the Book of Genesis.

God’s Favorite, Neil Simon’s delightful 1974 play based on the Book of Job.

One of the most influential books in American religious history, Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur, which tells a story parallel to Biblical stories of Jesus. The character of Judah Ben-Hur has become so ubiquitous in famous films that for many he is no longer fictional, but historic.

The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, by C.S. Lewis, which tells the story of Christ’s crucifixion in allegory.

Mikhail Bulgakov’s extraordinary—and very controversial—Russian novel, The Master and Margarita, written between 1928 and 1940, which satirizes Russian bureaucracy, is now widely considered one of the great novels in any language. It is also one of the most complex, but incredibly rewarding for those interested in Biblical allegories.

Susannah has maintained its moral relevance over many generations because it speaks to human dynamics that have never become dated. The opera’s male characters act on their most impulsive emotions and then justify them, all at the expense of one innocent young girl whose only crime was growing up. The opera is essentially about the hypocrisy of those who misuse faith for personal power, rather than being a statement on faith itself. Susannah is a deeply religious work, portraying a community forced to examine its own actions.

Carlisle Floyd wrote his own libretti, a trait he shared with Wagner (though Carlisle’s most admired historical composer was Giuseppe Verdi). Much of the music of Susannah has a folk-music quality, but all of it was composed by Carlisle; the only “borrowed” music in Susannah is a reference to Johann Sebastian Bach in the solo violin that opens the first scene—from the Violin Partita no. 3—long quoted by country music fiddlers.

Carlisle Floyd’s career had an enormous effect on 21st-century opera. When Susannah premiered in 1955, there were very few modern operas composed at all. During the 1950s, Billy Budd (Benjamin Britten), The Rake’s Progress (Stravinsky), and The Dialogues of the Carmelites (Francis Poulenc) achieved notoriety in Europe. In the United States, though, there was very little native music that captured the public’s imagination besides the multiple operas of Carlisle’s contemporary Gian Carlo Menotti, whose works he admired, The Ballad of Baby Doe (Douglas Moore), and Vanessa (Samuel Barber). Innovative music theater was happening in the commercial theater at that time, led by Rodgers and Hammerstein and the many inspired by them. 

Indeed, Hammerstein admired Susannah and thought it was a great new direction for opera, praise that meant more to Carlisle than anything else ever said about the opera. By the end of Carlisle’s life in 2021, those creative worlds had reversed: innovative musical theater has largely moved to the opera house, as evidenced by the nearly 300 new operas composed in the United States just in the 21st century, a level of newness not seen in opera since the end of the 19th. This wasn’t solely due to Susannah, but Carlisle’s opera played a huge role in that reality, and it made him enormously proud.