Carlisle Floyd
When soprano Phyllis Curtin took the stage at Florida State University in 1955 to sing the title role in Susannah, she was part of the premiere of an opera drawn from a story in the Biblical Apocrypha and transplanted to contemporary rural Tennessee, with dialogue written for a Southern dialect. The composer behind that work was Carlisle Sessions Floyd, who also wrote the libretto himself as he did for his other stage works.
Floyd was born on June 11, 1926, in Latta. He studied at Converse University and later at Syracuse University. Alongside his work as a composer, he served as a university teacher and wrote primarily in English. His stage works returned repeatedly to themes rooted in American experience, including the post-Civil War South, the Great Depression, and rural life. As his own librettist, he shaped both the music and the words of his operas.
Susannah is the opera most closely associated with his name. Over the course of his career, Floyd received recognition from a number of institutions. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Medal of Arts, and the Charles E. Lutton Man of Music Award. He was also inducted into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame.
Floyd died on September 30, 2021, in Tallahassee, at the age of ninety-five. His opera Susannah, rooted in biblical narrative and set against a backdrop of rural Tennessee, had its premiere at Florida State University in 1955 with Phyllis Curtin in the title role, and it remains the work most closely tied to his name as a composer and librettist.
Quotes by Carlisle Floyd
If an American audience is given a serious musical theater piece that is well produced, dramatically gripping and wonderfully acted, they’ll respond to it.
I had all the normal interests – I played basketball and I headed the school paper. But I also developed very early a great love for music and literature and the theater.
America tends to worship the modest talent because it doesn’t put us in an uncomfortable position vis-a-vis the artist.
I’ve never set out consciously to write American music. I don’t know what that would be unless the obvious Appalachian folk references.
The performances of my works in the last 10 years are probably equal to all the previous years put together. There are so many venues now and there is a completely new public for opera that’s grown up outside of the traditional core opera public.
If something is successful with the audience, it’s automatically suspect; the reverse is to say that not to reach audiences is the greatest compliment an artist can receive!
When I’ve seen my operas in Europe, they have always struck me as more American than when I hear them here. I can’t tell you what that phenomenon is.
Socially I never was an outsider. I have never thought of the conflict element before frankly, but perhaps it was wanting to belong, and at the same time wanting to retain one’s own personality.
It’s necessary to track characters all the way through an opera. If you’re dealing with more than one or two characters, it’s very easy to forget that the others have lives of their own that feed into the story.
It’s amazing how fast generations lose sight of other generations. One of the first things the young composers who come to work with me say is that they want to write music people will like, instead of gaining their credentials by being rejected by the audience.