Houston's Doll

Doll Bilby is no ordinary Salem witch. As a child in Brittany she is forced to watch as her parents are burned at the stake for witchcraft. Later she is brought to the colonies by Sea Captain Jared Bilby, who is enchanted by her. In Massachusetts, Doll takes one look at Bilby's wife Hannah and is able to wither the fetus in her womb--or so Hannah later contends. At 19, Doll takes a lover named Shad, convinced he is a messenger from the King of Hell. Arrested as a witch, she dies in jail convinced not only that she is one, but that Satan will be her salvation.

That is the core of Bilby's Doll, Carlisle Floyd's new opera, which was given its world premiere last week by the Houston Grand Opera. Floyd, 49, has written successful operas from Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights and John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, but is best known for Susannah, a retelling of the biblical story of Susanna and the elders from the Apocrypha. Since its first performance by the New York City Opera in 1956, Susannah has become the most frequently performed full-length American opera written since World War II.

Houston Opera General Director David Gockley, 32, commissioned Bilby's Doll as his company's bow to the Bicentennial celebration. He has presented it well. Ming Cho Lee's skeletal sets have just the right blend of reality and make-believe. As Doll, Catherine Malfitano, 27, acts intelligently and sings with a clear lyric soprano; she is obviously going places. The rest of the cast is almost as good, notably Mezzo Joy Davidson (Hannah), Bass Thomas Paul (Bilby) and Tenor Jack Trussel (Shad).

Yet the evening is a disappointment. Bilby's Doll confirms the composer's ambitious reach, but not, alas, his grasp of the subject. The story is drawn by Floyd himself from A Mirror for Witches, a historical novel by Esther Forbes. The libretto is as cluttered with conflicts as an O'Neill play, but it does not have half the dramatic impact. This comes as something of a surprise. Floyd's creed is that opera can succeed today only if the composer pays as careful attention to plot as if he were writing a play: the audience must believe the story.

All that sounds commendable enough at least in theory. But in the new opera too many developments take place during intermission or are expediently announced by the town crier. Further, Floyd seems to have forgotten that an opera audience surely wants to believe in the music at least as much as the story on stage. Floyd is ambivalent about his uses of music. He gives Doll a sweet ditty to sing as she makes dolls for two neighbors' children, but in a mad scene she is totally silent. Can one imagine Strauss or Donizetti abdicating their composers' rights at a moment like that?

Floyd relies on his orchestration--expert in its postromantic, pre-Elektra style--for most of his emotional impact. Yet that emotion is expended on shallow comments on the action, rather than on getting inside the characters. Reaching into and revealing heroes and heroines with music is what opera is all about.

William Bender

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