FROM AROUND THE WORLD: SAN DIEGO.(Review)

It's no wonder audiences love Carlisle Floyd's Cold Sassy Tree. The composer's musical rhetoric is solidly chiseled from the early twentieth-century American grain, easily accessible and unthreatening. The story, set in a small Northern Georgia town in the summer and fall of 1900, blends gentle rural humor with elements of romance. The ending is upbeat, and the composer has given everybody in the cast something that resembles a traditional aria to sing.

Unfortunately, the libretto too accurately reflects the diffuse and episodic quality of the Olive Ann Burns novel on which the opera is based. Act I looks a lot like a social satire along the lines of Britten's Albert Herring -- or perhaps a bitter attack on intolerance, not unlike Floyd's own Susannah. Love Simpson and her much older husband, Rucker Lattimore, seem doomed to a life of persecution by the town's clucking gossips. The theme of social intolerance so elaborately developed in Act I virtually vanishes, however, and Act II becomes a romantic comedy, as the couple's relationship transforms from practical business arrangement to love. Act III offers more jarring discontinuity, when the romance degenerates into melodrama. Out of the blue, Lattimore is shot and killed in a holdup. The story describes an accident, rather than a tragedy evolving organically from the ...