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Home , Gladys Cooper, Santa Fe Opera, The Letter (opera), The Letter (play)

WORLD PREMIERE Commissioned by The Santa Fe

MUSIC LIBRETTO After the play by W. Somerset Maugham

CONDUCTOR Patrick Summers DIRECTOR SCENIC DESIGNER Hildegard Bechtler COSTUME DESIGNER Tom Ford LIGHTING DESIGNER Duane Schuler CHORUS MASTER Susanne Sheston

Sung in English, with English and Spanish Opera Titles

The production is underwritten by the Avenir Foundation, Inc.

The commission is underwritten by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation . The director is underwritten by the Hon. Patricia McFate in memory of Ambassador Sidney N. Graybeal . The scenic designer is underwritten by Marica & Jan Vilcek . Additional support is provided by the General Director’s Premiere Fund and by the National Endowment for the Arts .

60 I THE 2009 FESTIVAL SEASON I 61 The Letter STORY CAST

The Story of the Opera The Cast in Order of Vocal Appearance

The opera is set in British Malaya between the world wars. The weather is hot and humid at all times . RACETTE

Scene I The Murder The Crosbies’ bungalow LESLIE CROSBIE ONG CHI SENG Six gunshots are heard in the darkness. Leslie Crosbie is discovered standing over the body of Geoff Hammond. an Englishwoman living in Malaya Joyce’s confidential clerk She telephones John Withers, a colonial official, and asks him to come at once, bringing her husband Robert. Rodell Rosel

Scene II The Confession The same, two hours later HEAD MAN A GUARD MICHAELS-MOORE Withers, Robert Crosbie, and Howard Joyce, Robert’s lawyer, have arrived. Leslie tells them that she shot Geoff Sung Eun Lee Andrew Stenson when he tried to rape her. Joyce explains that they will have to leave for Singapore, where Leslie will be arraigned on a charge of murder; he is puzzled by the fact that several gunshots seem to have been fired while Geoff was lying on the ground. Leslie claims to have been so upset that she can’t remember exactly what happened. ROBERT CROSBIE FIRST CLUBMAN Leslie’s husband, the manager Jason Slayden Scene III The Letter Howard Joyce’s law office in Singapore, two weeks later of a rubber plantation Anthony Michaels-Moore Joyce tells Robert that he expects Leslie will be acquitted, especially now that Hammond was known to be SECOND CLUBMAN JAMESON living with a Chinese woman. Ong Chi Seng, Joyce’s law clerk, tells him that Leslie sent a compromising Kevin Ray letter to Hammond on the day of the murder. He shows Joyce a copy of the letter and says that it will cost ten JOHN WITHERS thousand dollars to buy the original from Hammond’s mistress. a colonial official A CHINESE WOMAN Keith Jameson Mika Shigematsu Scene IV The Interview Leslie’s jail cell, an hour later

At first Leslie denies having written the letter, but then admits it is genuine. In a flashback, the actual events MADDALENA HOWARD JOYCE A JUDGE are portrayed: Leslie killed Geoff after he announced he was leaving her for his Chinese mistress. Leslie a Singapore lawyer Lucas Harbour pleads with Joyce to buy the letter in order to save her life. He reluctantly agrees to seek Robert’s permission to do so.

Scene V The Club The Singapore Club, late that afternoon GEOFF HAMMOND the Crosbies’ neighbor Joyce tells Robert about the letter, explaining its significance but not showing him the copy. HONEYWELL Robert agrees to pay whatever is necessary to purchase it. Roger Honeywell

Scene VI The Woman Joyce’s office, later that night Ong Chi Seng arrives with Hammond’s mistress. After some hesitation, she agrees to sell the letter.

Scene VII The Verdict A Singapore courtroom, the next day ROSEL The judge asks the foreman whether the jury has reached a verdict. To Leslie, the foreman appears to be the blood-soaked Geoff Hammond, who finds her guilty and condemns her to death by hanging. The real-life jury announces that she has been acquitted.

Scene VIII The Truth The bungalow, that same evening Robert announces that he plans to move with Leslie to Sumatra, where he has found an estate for sale. Joyce Support for artistic expenses has been provided by the Hank & Suzy Crouse Foundation; SHIGEMATSU informs him that his savings were wiped out in order to purchase the letter, and Robert demands to see it. Mr. & Mrs. Eugene H. Gardner; Brooke Suzanne Gray; Joanne & Arthur Hall ; Robert L. When he finds out what really happened, he tells Leslie that he loves her in spite of what she has done. & Myra Barker Hull ; Charles & Michelle Ritter; Alice C. Simkins; Gene & Jean Stark; “With all my heart,” she replies, “I still love the man I killed!” Edward A. Studzinski; Lore Thorpe; and an anonymous donor in honor of Rudy Avelar .

62 I THE SANTA FE OPERA 2009 FESTIVAL SEASON I 63 author of such celebrated novels as and , visited British Malaya ten years later in search of material, he met Ethel’s lawyer, who told him about the Proudlocks and suggested that Encounter their misadventures might make a good yarn. In 1924 Maugham wrote “The Letter,” a short story based on the Proudlock case that became one of his most admired in the pieces of writing.

Maugham is now mainly remembered as a writer of Jungle fiction, but in the Twenties he was also one of the most popular playwrights in the English-speaking world, and in 1927 he turned “The Letter” into a three-act play (also called The Letter ) that had long runs in and on Broadway and was filmed twice in Hollywood. The second version, released in 1940, was directed by William he opera you are about to see is Wyler and starred . Wyler’s film was even true—more or less. The names T more successful than the play, and to this day it remains have been changed, along with many of one of Davis’s best-known movies, just as the original the details, but The Letter is based on a story continues to be read. In all its versions, Maugham’s play that was adapted from a short fictionalized recounting of the Proudlock case is a savagely story that was inspired by an actual concise tale of jealousy, betrayal, vengeance, and death— murder that took place in southeast the stuff opera is made of, in other words. Yet it seems Asia nearly a century ago. never to have occurred to anyone to turn it into an opera until three years ago, when Paul Moravec and I began work on our musical version of The Letter .

On April 23, 1911, Ethel Proudlock, a Maugham’s play follows the known facts of the Proud - young English housewife living in Kuala lock case closely, with one major exception: Leslie Crosbie, Lumpur, a smallish town in what was Ethel’s fictional counterpart, is acquitted of the murder of then the British colony of Malaya, her faithless lover. Beyond that, though, most of what came home from church and shot and happens on stage is basically what happened in Kuala One of two known photos of Ethel Proudlock, shown here with her husband William visiting the Batu Caves near Kuala Lumpur. killed William Steward, a mining engi - Lumpur in 1911. All that Maugham added was the neer, on the veranda of the bungalow that old-fashioned plot twist that sets The Letter in motion: she shared with her husband, a local school - Leslie sends an incriminating letter to Geoff Hammond, master. Ethel told the police that Steward, a her lover, on the day of the murder. It falls into the hands William Steward, the mining engineer who was shot to death by friend of the family, had tried to rape her, of Hammond’s Chinese mistress, who uses the letter to Ethel Proudlock. but there was no evidence that any struggle blackmail Leslie. The result was a splendidly well-made had taken place. The truth was that Ethel stage thriller that William Wyler and Howard Koch, had almost certainly been having an affair who wrote the screenplay for The Letter , turned into a with Steward, and decided to kill him when movie that is for the most part surprisingly faithful to she found out that he was involved with Maugham’s original play. another woman. She was convicted of murder in June and sentenced to hang. The Sultan of Selangor commuted her sentence, and the The Letter is an opera noir , a Proudlocks and their three-year-old daughter story of ordinary people who make left Asia, never to return. a few mistakes and suddenly find Not surprisingly, Steward’s murder became themselves swept into very deep the talk of the close-knit British expatriate emotional water. community. When W. Somerset Maugham, the

64 I THE SANTA FE OPERA 2009 FESTIVAL SEASON I 65 Turning a play into an opera, however, is in some ways a In addition to , Paul had in mind Wozzeck , while more complex task than turning it into a film. The first I was thinking more of Salome , The Turn of the Screw , FROM ACT III , SCENE 2 of The Letter , FROM SCENE 8 of The Letter , step is to decide what kind of opera you want to write. and The Medium , but all of these works, like Maugham’s by W. Somerset Maugham by Paul Moravec and Terry Teachout Right from the start, Paul and I envisioned The Letter as play, are concise, fast-moving, and melodramatic in the an opera that would run for roughly ninety minutes, the best sense of that misunderstood word. CROSBIE: What do you want to do now? CROSBIE: What will you do now? same length as a film, and play without an intermission. Since so many modern have been both overlong Early on I ran across a remark that George Bernard Shaw LESLIE: It is for you to say. LESLIE: What do I care now? and musically uninviting, it struck us that we might do made about Il Trovatore that summed up what we wanted CROSBIE: It was for your sake I wanted to go CROSBIE: Go back to England? well to surprise everyone by making our first opera as to do with The Letter : away. I only saved that money for you. short and accessible as a classic Hollywood movie. What I shall have to stay here now, but I LESLIE: Go back to England? we wanted to write was a cross between a verismo opera It has tragic power, poignant melancholy, impetuous could manage to give you enough to What do I want there? like Tosca and a film noir like, say, Double Indemnity or vigour, and a sweet and intense pathos that never loses live on in England. What do I have there? Out of the Past —a hybrid that Paul calls opera noir . its dignity. It is swift in action, and perfectly homog - No family, no friends, enous in atmosphere and feeling. It is absolutely void LESLIE: Where am I to go? I have no family Nothing but memories. Another way to put it is that we wanted to write an up - of intellectual interest: the appeal is to the instincts left and no friends. I’m quite alone in dated version of a traditional repertory opera, a work to and the senses all through. the world. Oh, I’m so unhappy. which ordinary operagoers would respond as readily as connoisseurs or intellectuals—and which might also When I read those lines, I said to myself, That’s the kind appeal to people who know little or nothing about opera. of opera I want to write —and Paul agreed. Making Maugham’s dialogue shorter, less naturalistic and more lyrical required extensive adaptation.

As soon as the two of us were clear in our minds about ened the play’s emotional climate in order to give Paul, the direction in which we wanted to go, I started drafting whose style is intense and dramatic, sufficient expressive the libretto. An opera libretto is much shorter than a play, room to maneuver. One of the ways in which I did this since it takes longer to sing words than to speak them, so was by adding specifically “operatic” situations to the plot. the first thing I did was cut Maugham’s play in half, elim - The biggest change I made, for instance, was to insert a inating two secondary characters and changing much courtroom scene in which Leslie is confronted by the (though not all) of his language. No sooner did I start “ghost” of her lover. Of course he’s a hallucination, not a blue-penciling the dialogue than I recognized that most ghost, but the effect is the same, and Geoff’s surprise of it was unsingable. The Letter is a prosy play, and I had reappearance also gives him a chance to sing an aria. to make its language less naturalistic and more lyrical in order to make it suitable for musical treatment. I did this While most of these textual changes were my idea, the by stripping away every superfluous word. A librettist impetus for them came from Paul, who was concerned doesn’t have to spell things out: the composer does that about the coldness and cynicism with which Maugham with his music. Nor is there much room for subtlety in a had portrayed the characters in The Letter , especially libretto, since opera is a primary-color medium that deals Leslie. “If it’s cynical to look truth in the face and exercise exclusively in large, explicit emotions. You don’t need a lot common sense in the affairs of life, then certainly I’m a of words to say I love you or I hate you or I hope you die . cynic and odious if you like,” the narrator of one of his I spelled too many things out in the early drafts of The other short stories says. But opera isn’t about common Letter , but in each successive draft, encouraged by Paul, sense—it’s about love. “Opera isn’t a cynical medium,” I did my best to cut the text all the way down to the bare Paul told me. “It’s a lyrical medium. These people have to bones of emotion. have a reason to be singing. If they don’t, they’ll look silly up there.” To this end, we did all we could to open up the One of the things that Paul and I realized shortly after we constricted emotional world of The Letter . By the time we went to work was that the opera we wanted to write were through, we’d created a free-standing work of art would be very different in theatrical effect from the play whose emotional climate is far removed from that of on which it was based. In addition to making Maugham’s Maugham’s play, and even more so from the hard-nosed flat-textured dialogue lyrical enough to sing, I also height - short story on which it is based. Somerset Maugham’s 1927 stage adaptation of The Letter was a huge hit in London, where it starred and ran for more than a year. The New York presentation featuring Katherine Cornell (below right) was moderately successful, totaling 104 performances.

66 I THE SANTA FE OPERA 2009 FESTIVAL SEASON I 67 William Wyler directed Bette Davis in the 1940 film version of The Letter . Wyler and Davis collaborated two years earlier on Jezebel and were to do so again “There is a great satisfaction in building on The Little Foxes a year later. Despite the good tools for other people to use,” Freeman somewhat unconvincing ending mandated Dyson wrote in Disturbing the Universe . by Hollywood’s production code, The Letter was an outstanding film, nominated for That’s how I feel about my libretto for several including Best The Letter: I see it not as an independent Picture, Best Director and Best Actress. art object but as a theatrical tool, an opera- shaped vessel into which Paul has poured his music. And it’s his music, not mine, which meant that at the end of the day, he was by definition the senior partner in our collaboration. Neither one of us was shy about making suggestions—we talked over every line of the libretto and every bar of And what of Ethel and William Proud - the score, sometimes in excruciatingly lock, the unhappy couple who inspired niggling detail—but I knew that Paul The Letter ? They returned for a time to would have to feel comfortable with my England, then resettled in Canada. In words in order to do his best work, and 1916 they separated, never to meet again. so on the rare occasions when we had a William moved to Argentina to teach at disagreement about some aspect of the a boarding school for boys not far from Jeanne Eagels played Leslie Crosbie in the 1929 film version of The Letter . She was a legendary stage actress—charismatic, mercurial, and, by the libretto that couldn’t be resolved through Buenos Aires. He died there in 1958. standards of the time, highly naturalistic. Eagels was already familiar with discussion, I always did what he wanted. Ethel ended up in Miami, where she Maugham’s milieu of sexual hypocrisy in the Far East, having played the worked as a nurse and lived out her days prostitute Sadie Thompson in an adaptation of “Rain” which ran on As I look back on the process of writing in respectable obscurity, dying in 1974. Broadway for more than 800 performances. Eagels died a few months after The Letter , though, what I find most striking filming The Letter , at the age of 39, the result of a heroin and alcohol overdose. The following spring she was nominated posthumously for a was how infrequently we disagreed about While Maugham’s biographers have all Best Actress Academy Award for her portrayal of Leslie Crosbie. anything at all. This was partly because we made passing mention of the Proud - spent several months discussing the opera locks, it was not until the publication before I started writing the libretto, but in 1999 of Eric Lawlor’s Murder on the even more because we are, aesthetically Verandah: Love and Betrayal in British speaking, on the same page. No matter Malaya , a full-length study of the what you may think of my libretto, I hope Proudlock case, that their notorious past that you hear in Paul’s score some of the became widely known. None of the qualities that I had in mind when I wrote people whom they met in later life seem these words about his music in 2004, not to have had the slightest idea that they long after he won the Pulitzer Prize for had once been at the center of a scandal that inspired Tempest Fantasy and two years before we a short story, a play, two Hollywood movies—and, now, started writing The Letter: an opera. — Terry Teachout These powerfully moving pieces make sense . Their harmonies are lucid and logical, their melodies indelibly noble. They are, literally, eloquent, the painstakingly wrought utterances of an artist who believes with all his heart in the possibility of beauty.

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