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Transformations
A subjective slant on the Brothers Grimm

by Richard Mercier

Fairy tales have inspired many musical creations, especially in opera and ballet. Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty, Prokofiev's Cinderella, Rossini's La Cenerentola, Massenet's Cendrillon, and Humperdinck's Hansel und Gretel are among the most famous. One of the names that comes immediately to mind when one thinks of fairy tales is Grimm. The German brothers, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, published their two volumes of fairy tales in 1812, which steadily gained an audience as they were translated into many languages and read to children around the world. Movies and cartoons, such as Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, found a wide audience among young and old alike.

When the Minnesota Opera sought to commission a new work in 1972, the subject was drawn from a recently published book of poems entitled Transformations (Houghton, 1972) by Pulitzer Prize winning author Anne Sexton. Known for her "confessional" writing style, Sexton based the poems on several of Grimm's fairy tales. Each tale was transformed by the addition of material drawn from the author's personal experiences, resulting in a new perspective on the stories. References were made to her insomnia, ambivalent sexual feelings, suicide attempts, experiences in mental institutions, psychotherapy, and reliance on pills and alcohol. The result is a tightly woven tapestry of old tales infused with elements of modern life, a creation remarkably new yet familiar.

Once the subject for the new work was chosen, composer Conrad Susa was approached by the company's music director, Philip Brunelle, about the possibility of providing the music. "We have the book for you," he told Susa, "it will be Anne Sexton's Transformations." Normally the composer would have been involved in selection of the subject material but Susa, who up to that time was known predominately for choral anthems, examined the material and enthusiastically agreed to undertake the project.

Transformations

A series of conversations ensued between the interested parties: poet Anne Sexton, stage director H. Wesley Balk, conductor Philip Brunelle and composer Conrad Susa. The result was the selection and ordering of eleven poems (reduced to ten after the first performances). Philip Brunelle stated in a radio interview that the poems "are a series of vignettes about [Sexton's] life that could be put in any order . . . she is talking about attitudes, personal experiences. It's sort of a diary in poetical form." The poems and order were selected to form a linkage, one to the other. Brunelle continues, "The Grimm Brothers were interested in the human moral in all our lives . . . Anne Sexton realized she can take . . . the tales and give her own style, [make] Sextonesque points." According to Conrad Susa, "For each poem-story Anne Sexton includes a personal prologue which motivates the telling of the story."

The premier took place at the Cedar Village Theater, Minneapolis, Minnesota on May 5, 1973 with sopranos Barbara Brandt and Catherine Malfitano, mezzo soprano Janis Hardy, tenors Vern Sutton, Yale Marshall and James Rogness, baritone Barry Busse and bass William Dansby. In the introductory notes to the score, Susa wrote "Transformations is an entertainment [note he does not say opera!] in the manner of story theater through music. This means it is largely an ensemble piece especially suited for singers who can command popular as well as classical singing styles and who relish chances to play witches, towers, mirrors, greedy fathers or evil queens." An introduction to the broadcast one year later stated that each poem had a personal program or theme and running throughout was a subplot of a middle-aged witch who is transformed into a middle-aged beauty slipping into a nightmare. This character is the Anne Sexton figure who creates and leads the tales, sometimes watching from the side, sometimes entering into the action itself.

The poems and underlying themes are:

Act I	I.	The Gold Key - Our need to understand ourselves.
	II.	Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs - The ambivalent relationship of mother and daughter.
	III.	*The White Snake* - The divine madness of the artist.
	IV.	Iron Hans - Our ambivalence toward the insane.
	V.	Rumpelstiltskin - The Doppelgänger inside all of us.

Act II	VI.	Rapunzel - The need of older women for younger women.
	VII.	Godfather Death - The fear of death and desire for death.
	VIII.	The Wonderful Musician -The demonic power of music. A musician uses his talent to injure and deceive a fox, a wolf and a hare but escapes punishment by further use of his powers.
	IX.	Hansel and Gretel - Mother love and cannibalism.
	X.	Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty) - The ambivalent relationship of father and daughter.

Written for eight singers and eight instrumentalists it is a most effective chamber work. It is a real tour de force that demands the utmost in singing and acting skills from each of the performers. The work uses varied musical and singing styles (including Bing Crosby, Lena Horne, W. C. Fields, the Andrews Sisters, Ethel Merman) and dance forms such as the conga, beguine, samba, tango, fox-trot, habañera. The instrumental themes that run throughout the piece suggest such diverse composers as Monteverdi, Mahler, Massenet, Miles Davis, Nino Rota and Perez Prado. According to Balk there are three dramatic levels: "The first level is the most obvious, that of the fairy tale narrative. The second level, representing [Sexton's] personal life and the American milieu, is seen in the numerous anachronisms sprinkled among the medieval archetypes. Finally, and least tangible, is the level relating to madness and institutional life, obviously a part of her personal life."

Susa admits that he began work on the music after the singers were already working on the piece as straight theater. Work commenced on Dec. 12, 1972 and was completed in mid-March of 1973. Brunelle states that "Susa felt from reading her poems that Sexton had a great love of music and enjoyed listening and perhaps performing it in an amateur sense. There was a real flow harkening back to the 1940's." For this reason Susa filled the music with exotic dances, associating them with a particular fairytale and using the unusual orchestration to connect it to music of the day. The music of every other story is centered around a dance giving the actions great energy.

The end result is a remarkable evening of music and theater in which deep emotions are examined within the safe framework of humor and story telling. A review written by Andrew Porter of The New Yorker reads:

Susa's score is economical, intelligent, witty, alert: a cunning theatre piece, sure in its proportions and its varied gaits, always engaging and inventive. Each of Sexton's tales has an introduction; in her fables the moral is stated first, then comes the exemplification. This gives the composer a chance to practice his own kind of transformations . . . there are happy allusions to the styles of specific performers - Bing Crosby, the Andrews Sisters. The instrumentalists are also asked to be inventively imitative, to recall now Ethel Smith, now Perez Prad. I like the opera even better than the book of poems; fresh winds from the world blow into it. It inhabits the terrain of Stravinsky's Reynard and Soldier's Tale, Kurt Weill's... [Rise and Fall of the City of] Mahagonny and Seven Deadly Sins - not as an imitation of any of those works but in being a 1970's successor in scale, texture, and tunefulness, and in being delightful entertainment that is not trivial.

Anne Sexton attended the premiere performance of Transformations, very nervous but stunningly beautiful. At one point she shouted across the aisle to Susa, "Conrad, you're a genius!" When called up for her curtain call, the audience rose to its feet and she embraced each singer in turn. The opening was an overwhelming success and many productions of the opera have taken place since. The first performance was set in an institution, the performers obviously inmates. Since then set designers have moved away from that concept, adding their own imaginative bent to this multifaceted concept. When speaking with Susa I asked him which production had most closely matched his own conception. Without hesitation he mentioned a recent production at the St. Louis Opera. The entire concept was surreal and received mixed reviews from the critics but high praise from the composer. Perhaps the only version that will be able to address all the possibilities will be a movie version.

Richard Mercier is Director of Opera/Staff Accompanist at California State University at Hayward. He serves as music and stage director for the University's upcoming production of Transformations (see Calendar).

"The illustration, by Katherine Berney, is the artist's response to Anne Sexton's collection of poems, Transformations. The tall woman, under who's cloak the performance takes place, is Anne Sexton. Conrad Susa becomes a songbird who, having materialized from the literary smoke of Anne's right hand, alights affectionately on her finger (complete with baton in hand). Visiting from the Great Beyond are Brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. Together they begin to pull back the curtains and give us a glimpse of the world around Ms. Sexton. There, Truman Capote makes an appearance as Rumpelstiltskin, eager to become a parent of any sort. The young Anne Sexton is Rapunzel, an object of desire for both her grandmotherly landlady, and an admiring and heroic prince. One can also spot Godfather Death hard at work, and Iron Hans is safely locked away."