Charles Sanford Skilton.(Review)

Charles Sanford Skilton. The Sun Bride: A Pueblo Indian Opera. Edited by Thomas Warburton. (Recent Researches in American Music, 33.) Madison, Wisc.: A-R Editions, c1999. [Acknowledgments, p. vii; introd., p. vii-xviii; text, p. xix-xxix; 2 plates; score, 132 p.; crit. report, p. 133-35. ISBN 0-89579-437-3. $55.]

Composed in 1928, Charles Sanford Skilton's one-act opera The Sun Bride is a relatively late representative of the early-twentieth-century subgenre of serious operas by Euro-Americans on Native American themes and subjects. Having never been staged or (until now) published, it is even more obscure than those operas whose names, if not their music, are better known. (For the record, these include most prominently Arthur Nevin's Poia, produced in 1907; Frederick Shepherd Converse's The Sacrifice, 1911; Victor Herbert's Natoma, 1911; Mary Carr Moore's Narcissa, 1912; Henry Hadley's Azora, the Daughter of Montezuma, 1917; and Charles Wakefield Cadman's Shanewis, 1918, and his unperformed Daoma.) This review will therefore begin by summarizing Lilian White Spencer's libretto and characterizing Skilton's music, then consider Thomas Warburton's edition and his introductory essay.

After a short prelude, the Sun Bride eloquently laments that she will never have the fulfillment of a male human lover or see the full light of day but must instead remain in her kiva, attended by the women of her clan and shielded from all male eyes save those of the cacique (priest). Any male person who sets eyes on her is doomed to be struck dead by her symbolic consort, the sun. Bluefeather, a stranger on the run from his own pueblo, catches sight of the Sun Bride and is smitten by her charms as she finishes her aria and retreats into the kiva. Determined to win her and overcome his own disgrace, he invokes his god, Chameleon. After a short interlude, the men and maidens of the pueblo, with a little help from the cacique and the Bride, bless the four directions of the compass in an elaborate ceremony, thereby causing the sun to rise. The villagers go about their daily business, which means that the women go about their corn-grinding. Reenter Bluefeather, who wins the men's friendship with a display of br avado. At his suggestion, they begin to gamble, playing a sort of shell game with moccasins. After three rounds, Bluefeather has won everything the tribe possesses, right down to the cacique's gorgeous raiment and the Sun Bride herself. The Sun's medicine turns out to be stronger than Chameleon's, however, and Bluefeather is struck dead the moment he lays a hand on the Bride. The cacique gets his costume back, the Sun Bride happily embraces her cloister, and the inhabitants of Puebla Bonita regain their freedom in a final chorus.

Skilton (1868--1941) is of the generation labeled "Romantic Nationalist" by Gilbert Chase, but his music for The Sun Bride is mildly modern. The opening and closing scenes are rather dissonant, and the settings of native melodies and exotic ceremony are for the most part neoclassically stark. The melody assigned to Bluefeather, used in leitmotif fashion, is the main exception. An unfortunate tendency to use chromatic scales either in contrary motion or in parallel sevenths to represent tension and excitement emphasizes the composer's limitations.

As editor, Warburton has labeled the instrumental interludes and scenes to make the work's formal structure clear; he has also edited a libretto, with spelling and punctuation regularized, from the several versions of the score described in the critical apparatus. The sources of the native melodies used in the opera noted in Skilton's score are removed to the editor's narrative. Bluefeather's invocation starts with melody no. 174, a moccasin gambling song from Frances Densmore's Chippewa Music (2 vols., Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletins, 45, 53 [Washington, D.C., 1919-13; reprint, New York: Da Capo Press, 1972]). For the sunrise ceremony, Skilton uses a "Sunrise Hymn" he learned from a Winnebago Indian in Lawrence, Kansas; a flageolet melody (Densmore) provides musical contrast. The women of the pueblo sing a corn-grinding song as described and transcribed by Natalie Curtis Burlin (The Indians' Book: An Offering by the American Indians of Indian Lore, Musical and Narrative, to F orm a Record of the Songs and Legends of Their Race [New York: Harper and Bros., 1907; 2d ed., 1923; reprint, New York: Dover, 1968]). Bluefeather boasts to a "Navajo War Song" as found on a Columbia recording, regrettably not further identified. Densmore no. 174, or maybe 184, is a gambling song to go with the gambling scene. Warburton details how each of Skilton's melodic appropriations differs in metric designation and pitch level from the (transcribed) "original" sources, but he has not tracked down the specifics of the recording or found the source of the "legend ... from the Pueblo Indians of the four corners region" (p. xiii) that is said to be the source of the plot. In the balance of his essay, he addresses the once-contentious issue of opera in English, the scarcity of venues for productions of ...