May 16th – 22nd: Howard Hanson’s Merry Mount

The drama

The story of Merry Mount is set in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1625.  The story runs concurrently on two separate but inter-twined levels: in the background, the conflict between an established settlement of Puritans and a band of Cavaliers newly arrived from England; in the foreground, the personal drama involving one man and his own internal conflicts. The action depicts at once the psychological-erotic drama of Wrestling Bradford, the Puritans’ preacher, is a man at war with himself, wrestling with longings that find no outlet, and that manifest themselves in dreams in which he perceives himself to be tempted by diabolical forces; and also the attempt by a band of Cavaliers newly arrived from England to found a colony of their own.  They arrive bearing a warrant from King Charles giving them a grant to that particular strip of land, but it seems that the King had overlooked the fact that there was already a settlement of Puritans occupying the site.  The Cavaliers, with their music, their jollity, and their unabashed acknowledgement of human emotions, observe a decidedly different way of life from the cheerless Puritans. The latter are horrified by the Cavaliers; one of their elders, Praise-God Tewke, goes so far as to invoke Divine wrath upon them—“Thou Lord of Heaven, Unseal the fountains of Thy wrath upon this generation of hellish vipers!”—and then tells the Cavaliers “in a voice of thunder,” “Enough, ye Sons of Darkness!  Hark to my word: Cast off your ship, and get you home to England!”  Nevertheless, it is the day of the Sabbath, and the two sides agree to a truce, deferring their differences until the next day.  Act I ends with the Puritans resolving to “be lions of Jehovah And tear the flesh of unbelievers” while off-stage, the Cavaliers are proceeding with their worldly intentions and erecting a Maypole.

As Act II begins, the Cavaliers are engaged in their May Day festivities.  The extensive stage directions outlining the festivities are a wonder to read: they conjure up a scene of riotous bacchanalia, an atmosphere wine and revelry abound, where up is down and down is up, and where opposing sides join together in harmony (the proverbial St. George and the Dragon walk about the stage arm in arm, for example).  We might liken the scene to the song “The Lusty Month of May” in the musical Camelot by Lerner and Loewe.  The Maypole scene is an extended episode featuring dancers on the stage.  The Puritans, in their antagonism, break the truce and savagely attack the Cavaliers, taking them captive and toppling the Maypole. Wrestling Bradford, meanwhile, forms an attraction to one of the Cavalier women, Lady Marigold Sandys, who happens already to be engaged to Sir Gower Lackland (the May King in the Maypole scene).  In the wake of the Puritans’ attack upon the Cavaliers, Marigold is taken captive and Sir Gower is killed.  Bradford has a dream in which he swears his allegiance to the devil and places a destructive curse upon New England.  When Bradford has awoken from his dream, he finds that the neighboring Native Americans (referred to as “Indians” in the published score), who had suffered the indignation of their land being misappropriated by the Puritans when the latter had arrived from England, have attacked the Puritans’ settlement and have set fire to it.  At the opera’s conclusion, Bradford is under the influence of his dream-induced delusion and has fallen from grace in the eyes of his Puritan flock.  He seizes Marigold and carries her into the raging flames—a murder-suicide—while the Puritans, surrounded by the flaming ruins of their village, kneel in desolate prayer as the curtain falls.

The antecedents, the commission, and the premiere

The story as depicted in the opera has antecedents in historical fact and in literature.  First, it is established that in the 1620s, a group of Cavaliers landed from England and established a settlement that became known as Mount Wollaston (on the site of what is today the town of Quincy, Massachusetts). Their leader, Thomas Morton, proclaimed the place “Merry Mount” by name and commanded that a Maypole be set up as the site for dancing and acting out May Day jollity, thereby earning the wrath of the local Puritans. The governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Endecott, intervened and ordered that the maypole be cut down.  John Morton, as the accused ringleader, was severely punished and was banished to England.  (In the opera, Thomas Morton appears as the uncle of the leading soprano, Lady Marigold Sandys.)

That particular Maypole event was used by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) in his short story “The May-Pole of Merry Mount” which was published in Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales (first volume, 1837).  Hawthorne added his own layer of detail to the story, no doubt for literary and dramatic purposes.  Then, nearly a full century later, writer and critic Richard L. Stokes (1882-1957) used Hawthorne’s tale as his point of departure for a book-length poem that the Metropolitan Opera Company had commissioned, the poem to serve as the libretto of a new opera. Having accepted the Met’s commission, Stokes undertook extensive research on the history of Puritanism in the U.S., gaining insights that would greatly inform his completed poem.  Stokes completed the poem in 1931, and in 1932 it was published by Farrar and Rinehart as “a dramatic poem for music in three acts of six scenes”.  Stokes exercised a considerable degree of poetic license which he himself took care to justify, both in his preface to the publication and in statements published after the opera’s premiere performance.^[1]

At this juncture, enter Howard Hanson. As Hanson would later recount, he was nominated by no fewer than three music critics to receive the Met’s commission to compose the music to Stokes’ poem.^[2]  Up to this time Hanson had composed mainly orchestral music and choral music, but he was favorably challenged by the musical and dramatic possibilities posed by Stokes’ poem, and he readily accepted the commission.  Hanson worked on his opera throughout 1931-32, somehow finding the time to compose while holding down his administrative day job.  He would later recount this time management challenge in his Autobiography, writing “. . . I became more than ever a midnight composer . . .” on grounds that he had mostly worked on the opera between the hours of eleven P.M. and two A.M..^[3]  However daunting the challenge may have been, Howard Hanson was never one to agonize over anything.  He was fired to his task, and he was, as always, supremely confident of his own abilities.

Further to the unfolding production work, only a small number of communications are extant today that indicate any of the specifics; these all come from the Howard Hanson Collection, manifest in Hanson’s correspondence with librettist Stokes and with baritone Lawrence Tibbett, who would play Wrestling Bradford in the premiere at the Met.  Along the way to the premiere, the Metropolitan Opera Company granted permission for a concert performance that would precede the Met’s staged production; the concert performance took place at the University of Michigan’s annual May Festival in Ann Arbor, Michigan on May 20th, 1933.  The opera’s premiere at the Met was a matinee performance on February 10th, 1934, which was broadcast live via the NBC national radio network; the broadcast was picked up in Rochester, New York by radio station WHAM.  There were six more performances at the Met, followed by three run-out performances in Brooklyn, Philadelphia, and Rochester. A scheduled performance in Boston was cancelled after some local protest, the Bostonians having incorrectly perceived a slight of their esteemed local ancestor William Bradford, first governor of the Plymouth Colony.

As is amply indicated from the New York press reviews preserved in Howard Hanson’s pressbooks, the premiere performance of Merry Mount was greeted with rapturous applause and with numerous curtain calls. Nevertheless, the Met did not retain Merry Mount in its active repertory.  Hanson would later recount in his Autobiography that the Metropolitan Opera Company’s impetus for producing American operas was lost in the wake of two unexpected occurrences. First, General Manager Gatti-Cazassa suddenly and unexpectedly resigned and returned to Italy; his successor, American basso Herbert Witherspoon, was an enthusiast for American opera but died of a heart attack shortly after his appointment.  He was succeeded in turn by Canadian-born tenor Edward Johnson,^[4] whose mandate was simply to keep the Met afloat and solvent in a time of continuing economic depression.  Thus, there could be no possibility of producing any more new works at the Met for the foreseeable future; in the ensuing thirty years, fewer new American operas were produced at the Met than had been produced in the latter half-dozen years of Gatti-Cazassa’s administration.^[5]

Faced with the prospect of his opera falling into obscurity, Hanson set about re-distributing its music in various guises.  He fashioned a suite of instrumental music from some of the opera’s episodes and called it Merry Mount Suite (published for orchestra by Harms, 1938; and for concert band [without the May-pole Dances] by Carl Fischer).  The Merry Mount Suite has enjoyed a modest life of its own, having been commercially recorded and having occasionally been performed in concert halls.^[6]  However, the Suite is not musically representative of the opera at large, retaining as it does only the opera’s more animated passages, and omitting the generally cheerless episodes.  Further, the “Maypole Dances”—the opera’s only explicitly joyous movement—were withheld from the band version.  Hanson also made a “radio version” which has had one known performance (at the 17th Annual Festival of American Music, Eastman School of Music on May 3rd, 1947). The performing forces were the Eastman-Rochester Symphony Orchestra, the Eastman School Chorus, and selected vocal soloists, all under Hanson’s baton. The radio version performance was broadcast under the auspices of NBC’s “Orchestras of the Nation” series. The radio version represented an extensively abridged version; the one and only performance lasted just over one hour.  Finally, it remains that certain vocal numbers from the opera have been performed in isolation on recital programs here and there; the Howard Hanson Collection contains printed programs from several such.  Specifically, these have been the arias “Oh, ‘tis an earth defiled” (Bradford) and “No witch am I” (Marigold), the love duet between Bradford and Astoreth, and the chorus “It is the house of gay carouse”.

The printed program for the 1955 production contains many names well remembered today, both in the vocal corps and in the orchestra.