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The Operas of Carlisle Floyd
The Passion of Jonathan Wade
The Double Life of Jonathan Wade

"I'm never happier than when I'm in the theater working with singers and set and lighting designers. I love every aspect of it." Carlisle Floyd

by Robert Wilder Blue

Carlisle Floyd's fifth opera (also his twelfth - more about that later), The Passion of Jonathan Wade, was commissioned by the Ford Foundation and given its world premiere by the New York City Opera Company on October 11, 1962. Floyd called it "without any question" his grandest opera. "It was not intended to be that. I simply had a story to tell. I never thought of it in grand opera terms [although] it has certainly the scope and demands that a grand opera should have." The forces required to perform the opera (seven principal roles, seven supporting roles, three choruses, an army of supernumeraries, plus an orchestra of at least 60 players) leave no question that it is opera at its grandest. In its political conflicts and personal turmoil, Jonathan Wade recalls Verdi's great opera, Don Carlo.

The opera is set in Columbia, South Carolina (about 100 miles from Floyd's birthplace, Latta, S.C.). Discontent had begun to surface in South Carolina at the beginning of the 19th century over (what South Carolinians viewed as) interference by the federal government in states' rights. Talk of secession arose as early as the 1830 in reaction to federal tariff laws deemed unfair to the state's businesses. In 1832, South Carolina senator (and former U.S. Vice President), John C. Calhoun developed the theory of nullification by which a state could reject any federal law it considered to be a violation of its rights. Calhoun became the acknowledged, if unofficial, leader of the South and his political views provided the outline for the Confederacy. Over the ensuing decades, the state's economic grievances mounted and its resolve to fight the abolition of slavery solidified. When Abraham Lincoln was elected President on December 20, 1860, South Carolina became the first state to secede from the Union. Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor on April 12, 1961 and the American Civil War began.

For four years, the war was fought predominantly on Southern soil, leaving one state after another devastated. By early 1865, Union General William T. Sherman had begun his campaign to destroy South Carolina. In "The Burning of Columbia, South Carolina - Report on the Campaign of the Carolinas," Sherman wrote, "In anticipation of the occupation of the city, I had made … written orders to destroy, absolutely, all arsenals and public property not needed for our own use, as well as all railroads, depots, and machinery useful in war to an enemy, but to spare all dwellings, colleges, schools, asylums, and harmless private property." However, it was difficult to dampen the zeal of the Union soldiers, who viewed the state as the birthplace of the Secession and were intent on deliberate and total destruction. It is uncertain how fire broke out in Columbia on the night of February 17th. Sherman charged Confederate General Wade Hampton with starting it when he ordered all cotton be moved into the streets and burned. Union Major General Henry W. Slocum wrote, "I believe the immediate cause of the disaster was a free use of whisky…. A drunken soldier with a musket in one hand and a match in the other is not a pleasant visitor to have about the house."

Slocum described the scene, "The lurid flames could easily be seen from my camp, many miles distant. Nearly all the public buildings, several churches, an orphan asylum, and many of the residences were destroyed. The city was filled with helpless women and children and invalids, many of whom were rendered houseless and homeless in a single night. No sadder scene was presented during the war. The suffering of so many helpless and innocent persons could not but move the hardest heart."

By the time Lincoln was inaugurated for a second term as President on March 4, 1865, the war was moving towards its end and the federal government was directing its attention to reconstruction of the South. In his inaugural address, Lincoln said, "With malice toward none; with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to … achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations."

Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union General Ulysses S. Grant on April 9. At 10:13 p.m. on April 14, Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth; he died the following morning. Confederate forces surrendered to Sherman at Durham, North Carolina on April 18 and by May the Civil War was over. Over 620,000 Americans had died in the war; disease killed twice as many as had been lost in battle. 50,000 survivors returned home as amputees. One fifth of the white male population of South Carolina had been killed.

The war left the Southern economy devastated and its political structure destroyed. The Era of Reconstruction (1865-77) that followed the war was hardly less disastrous. It was a period of political, social and economic upheaval and considerable violence; efforts to reconstruct the South were compromised by corruption and disagreement over the role of the federal government.

Conservative Northern politicians wanted to ensure equal rights for former slaves and supported Lincoln's plan for providing federal funding for the quick rebuilding of the South. A powerful group of congressmen known as the Radical Republicans wanted to punish the South for starting the war and sought to assure the Republican party's political power in the Democratic South. While they agreed with those elements of Lincoln's program aimed at uplifting blacks, they advocated taking all political power from leaders of the former Confederacy as well as seizing their property for distribution to the former slaves. Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson, was an ideologue with little skill at managing political disagreement. As a Southern Democrat, he favored Lincoln's reconstruction plans. Ultimately, however, Johnson's inflexibility cost him the support of moderate Republicans in Congress and the Radical Republicans emerged with the power to proceed with their own plans.

The two sides managed to work together to create the Freedmen's Bureau, an organization designed to assist blacks in the transition from slavery to freedom. The Bureau created schools, addressed labors abuses, helped to reunite ex-slave families and worked to protect the freedmen's rights. It was run on the state and local levels by politically appointed agents whose task it was to carry out decisions made by the federal government. However, the agents were often more concerned with their own political advancement than in the reconstruction and easily became corrupted. Union forces had remained in the South in the form of an occupation army. Its officers were put in the awkward position of taking orders from the local Freedmen's Bureau agents rather than higher-ranking army officers and thus were caught between federal mandates and local political maneuvering.

It is against this backdrop, in May 1865, that The Passion of Jonathan Wade begins. Carlisle Floyd described the genesis of the opera thus:

"Jonathan is a character wholly of my own invention, as are all the other characters in the opera. The story as well is entirely fictitious, although several of the incidents are deliberate paraphrases of historical occurrences.

"Jonathan Wade began as a germinal dramatic idea which was suggested to me by my wife. It excited me and I immediately began to develop a story around the theme of a Northern occupation officer caught in a terrible conflict of conscience and duty during the early Reconstruction in the South.

Phyllis Curtain and Theodor Uppman in the New York City opera premiere of The Passion of Jonathon Wade (1962)

"I felt instinctively … that the Reconstruction was the most intrinsically dramatic period in Southern history, if not in all American history. [It] was a time of great collision of intensely held ideologies … [and] an interesting conflict of cultures, that of the agrarian society of the South, a really Cavalier society, and the middle-class Puritan civilization of New England which was introduced into the South with the influx of carpetbaggers and Northern politicians after the war.

"This conflict of cultures furnished me with the materials for two important characters, Jonathan and Celia. What struck me perhaps most forcibly (and without conscious interest emerged as a kind of theme for the opera) was the fact that in an age of great extremism effective action became impossible for the man of reasonableness, common sense and compassion. Or to put it differently, in an age of vehement 'taking of sides,' if a man takes neither side he risks being destroyed by both. It hardly needs pointing out that this theme is unfortunately timeless.

"The word 'passion' is used in its archaic sense of suffering and martyrdom, but Jonathan is more active than a Christ-figure, who we quite often think of as being quite passive. I didn't want a plastic scene at all. I wanted to tell a story about a human being in an unconscionable situation. Jonathan is basically just a good and decent man."

When the curtain goes up on the opera, Columbia's citizens sing, 'Spring was late in coming this year/ As if loathe to waste its splendor on desolate hearts…We who were reckless, defiant, and proud/ Are now consumed with weariness.' Jonathan Wade, an Occupation Army officer is there to oversee the reconstruction program. Jonathan is symbolic of the many well-intentioned Northerners who sympathized with South's grief and tried to assist with reconstruction. "If Jonathan Wade has a flaw," said Floyd, "it is his own gullibility and his own tendency to gage everyone by his own standards. There's a kind of naïveté that comes with the idealist that is in the character of Jonathan Wade."

Jonathan falls in love with Celia Townsend, a Southern war widow. Celia is a daughter of the Southern aristocratic tradition whose power had been supported by wealthy plantation owners and sustained by slavery. When Celia meets Jonathan, she denounces him for not understanding the depth of suffering of the South. Jonathan reveals his own grief over losses he suffered from the war; Celia begins to understand him and her attitude towards him softens. Though she continues to mourn the loss of her husband, she proves willing to forgive and change, and attempts to get on with rebuilding her life.

Jonathan and Celia eventually marry, despite the objections of Celia's father, Judge Brooks Townsend. Judge Townsend epitomizes southern whites who had not been supportive of the secession and the Confederacy and who had mixed feelings about the reconstruction efforts. The great African-American scholar and activist W.E.B. DuBois wrote, "There were men in the South and former slaveholders who knew the truth and spoke it. They knew that there could be no salvation for the South in time or eternity, until the former slave went forth as a man. But the entrenched intolerance of the South, coupled with the awful grief at the death of the flower of Southern manhood, let such prophets speak but few words."

For Southern blacks, the transition from slavery to freedom was tumultuous. In their efforts to gain equal rights and procure economic opportunities, many aligned themselves with northern carpetbaggers and Freedmen's Bureau agents, who were often genuinely concerned for the well-being of blacks but generally operated more in their own self-interest. Carlisle Floyd discussed the delicate balance between painting an accurate picture of history and avoiding demeaning stereotypes. "I've tried to give as broad a spectrum of the black population's various strata as I have to the white population's. Judge Bell represents the highly educated black, a cultivated man of great probity and intellect. Although such people did exist, they were in short supply in 1865. The norm were recently freed slaves, most of whom were illiterate. There is nothing in my opera that's intentionally offensive. But I'm not writing a history lesson or a political polemic. The characters in the opera who use terms like 'nigger' are not very admirable human beings."

One of the most interesting characters in the opera is Nicey. She was also the riskiest to create: a black housekeeper instantly brings up all of the stereotypes that have appeared for a hundred years on stage and in film. "I simply wanted to avoid any kind of stereotype Aunt Jemima or of the Mamie from Gone With The Wind," said Floyd. "Yet with all of the engaging qualities of those stereotypical characters, what they basically are and remain, whether they are white or black, are earth mothers. They have great nurturing instincts and also a kind of profound intuitive wisdom which I think Nicey embodies. I have said repeatedly that Nicey is the soul of the opera. She sees everyone in a way much sooner than anyone else; [she has] very little idealization of anyone."

Caught between the two political extremes, the Radical Republicans (represented in the opera by Ely Pratt, an agent for the Freedmen's Bureau) and Southerners who wanted to deny former slaves their freedom and rights (Lucas Wardlaw in the opera), Jonathan decides to desert the Army and flee with Celia rather than be party to the growing corruption. Just as Jonathan and Celia are about to leave Columbia, Jonathan is shot and killed. The various factions accuse one another of his murder, but Celia cries out that they are all responsible for her husband's death.

Floyd described his approach to writing the libretto, saying, "I wanted to write an even-handed treatment that was as historically accurate as I could make it. My aim with Jonathan Wade was to create a libretto in which no one would know whether the author was Southern or Northern. And yet inevitably there is a certain amount of swaying towards the people who have been destroyed by the war. It's the only war we ever had in which a region of country was actually destroyed internally. All of our wars, except for the Revolutionary War, have been fought on foreign soil. But to destroy an entire region, physically and economically, which they did, you engender a perpetual feeling of victimization. The point is that a culture was destroyed, quite deliberately."

On October 1, 1962, ten days before the world premiere of The Passion of Jonathan Wade, James Meredith became first African-American student to enroll at the University of Mississippi. Mississippi governor Ross Barnett had tried to block the admission but was unsuccessful. Three thousand federal troops were on hand to quell the riots that had erupted; two people lost their lives.

[Part II]