REKINDLING MISS HAVISHAM'S FIRE.(Dominick Argento revises his opera)

When Dominick Argento set about writing a new opera for Beverly Sills, she was at the absolute peak of her fame. Her belated Metropolitan Opera debut had been front-page news, and she was about to assume directorship of New York City Opera, with Julius Rudel as the company's principal conductor. Argento, too, had broken into the front rank of composers, with rave reviews for his opera The Voyage of Edgar Allan Poe and a Pulitzer Prize for his song cycle From the Diary of Virginia Woolf. The resulting opera, Miss Havisham's Fire, based on Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, opened at New York City Opera in 1979. Unperformed since its premiere run, the work has been thoroughly overhauled for a major revival at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis this month.

Sills had long wanted an opera in which she would play Empress Carlotta of Mexico. But her main requirement was for something grandly befitting what might well prove her last new role. "It was Beverly's idea to make it the kind of marathon piece it was," Argento recalls. "She had said to me, `Every time I've been onstage, by the time I get the voice doing exactly what I want to do, and I could sing for hours, the curtain comes down, it's over. And you're so up at that point.'" Argento understood perfectly; during his association with Minneapolis's Guthrie Theater, he had observed actors unable to come down after a performance. "Beverly wanted me to write a piece that, if possible, when she was finished, she would feel like a wrung-out rag."

The composer began research on the Carlotta story, and a libretto was begun by Charles Nolte, but Sills was still open to other ideas. It was Argento who brought up Miss Havisham, the jilted bride in Great Expectations. He and librettist John Olon-Scrymgeour already had thought of the subject for a one-act opera intended to make a full evening with their Chekhov-inspired monodrama A Water Bird Talk, about a man in an unhappy marriage. Miss Havisham's Wedding Night, an extended thirty-minute mad scene for soprano, became the basis for the epilogue of the evening-long opera. In expanding the mad scene into a full-length work, Argento and Olon-Scrymgeour went back to Dickens, "eliminating much of Pip's story, with the inheritance plot, and concentrating on Miss Havisham and how she raises Estella to break men's hearts." Their boldest departure from Dickens was the creation of an examiner's inquest into the death of Miss Havisham, with her relatives and staff called back to testify. Some critics were unhappy with this structure, in which the story is told in flashbacks, but Argento felt it was the only solution. "We wanted to show her in so many different situations in the original work: as a teenager, as young bride-to-be, as a disgruntled lady and then manipulator of Pip and Estella -- and in her old age, madness and death. The only way to do that, it seemed, was to use the inquest idea so that somebody could talk about `on the wedding day, such and such,' or `when she met so-and-so.'" A nanny for Miss Havisham was invented, allowing someone who witnessed the bridal day to be present at the inquest.

The entire texture of the opera changed drastically when Sills withdrew from the project before the premiere could take place. Argento obviously loves voices, and he confirms, "I've always taken pride in the fact that most of the things I've written in my maturity have been designed for specific singers, whether it be Janet Baker [the Woolf cycle] or Frederica [von Stade -- the Browning settings, Casa Guidi] or Beverly. The singer is almost always the clue to how the piece is going to come out." Without a superstar to carry the gargantuan title part, it was decided that two singers would split the role. "And that, for me, was one of the disasters of the piece. Because you get all the sympathy going for Gianna Rolandi, who was adorable, and then on comes a completely different singer, Rita Shane, [who was] a wonderful singer. But what should have carried over from the heartbreak that you saw with the young singer is now sort of lost on a brand-new character who walks onstage [and] doesn't resemble the first one whatsoever."

At its premiere, Miss Havisham's Fire had two gigantic eighty-minute acts, sixteen scenes and an enormous cast. Cutting began during the initial run, with twenty minutes gone by the closing night. "Some people, such as Rudel and Christopher Keene, were feeling some of the length of it," says Argento. "But had it been Sills, no one would have complained about the time."

Miss Havisham's revision is dated 1996. Surely there was a revival in mind? "No. I just couldn't leave it that way. I've often told friends of mine that what hurt so much was that I thought it was the best music I could possibly write. The music in it I like possibly better than any music I've written. It became such a white elephant, and it sat there, and nobody was going to touch it in its present form. I thought, I just can't let it sit there like that. I just wanted to get it right."

James Robinson, director of the Saint Louis revival, also felt that the work deserved more attention. "It is such a beautiful piece, and it contains some of his best music. I started taking it around to every opera company I had an association with." He sees Argento as "a real man of the theater," and indeed Miss Havisham's Fire is the work of a born opera composer. Particularly effective is the way tonality weaves in and out, delineating the different levels of the story. In the first flashback, the wedding day, young Miss Havisham sings a ...