EYERLY: The House of the Seven Gables.(Review)

EYERLY:The House of the Seven Gables [] Smith, Rushton; Schaffner, Aquilino, Johmon; Manhattan School of Music Opera Theater and Orchestra, Gilbert. Text. Albany Records TROY 447 (2)

Scott Eyerly's opera adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables had its New York premiere last December as part of Manhattan School of Music's ambitious Opera Theater program and is now available as a two-disc set from Albany Records. From the evidence here, Eyerly seems to have been quite successful in translating Hawthorne's subtle, moody, narrative-heavy novel to the stage. Hawthorne's book treats one of the author's favorite moral themes -- that the wrongdoing of one generation lives into the successive ones. The house of the title is built on land that Colonel Pyncheon, the family founder, wrested from a certain Matthew Maule by accusing Maule of witchcraft during the Salem witch trials. Maule's dying curse -- "God will give you blood to drink!" -- accurately foretold the Colonel's choking death, which has reenacted itself through subsequent generations of the Pyncheon family. The last death, thirty years ago, resulted in the conviction and imprisonment of Clifford Pyncheon for the murder of his uncle. As the story opens, Clifford has just been released. By the end, we learn that he is innocent; it was his idle, reckless cousin Jaffrey who triggered the uncle's death -- an apparently hereditary type of seizure -- and planted evidence to frame Clifford as the murderer. The book (and the opera) climaxes with Jaffrey's own choking death as the latest victim of the Maule curse.

Eyerly, who wrote his own libretto, departs considerably from the book. Many details have been changed or added, with a thoughtful eye toward clear narrative and maximum drama. One pivotal scene in the opera, a confrontation between Clifford and Jaffrey (now the respected and formidable Judge Pyncheon), is entirely Eyerly's creation. This highly dramatic encounter, in which Clifford forces Jaffrey to recount the details of his ...