Paul Bunyan Operetta by Benjamin Britten Seeing Amazing Revival
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After a meteoric rise, for more than half a century the Paul Bunyan legend has held little fascination for Americans, or anyone else in the world for that matter.
That precipitous decline in popularity has occurred despite the fact that the character of Paul Bunyan is one of the most recognizable folklore figures in the nation, if not the world.
Now, almost miraculously, an operetta written 63 years ago is sweeping the music world. Since it first played at the Columbia Theater in New York in 1941, no record of a reprise has been found anywhere in North America. However, the 1997 production of Paul Bunyan was winner of the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Opera Production by the Royal Opera in Covent Garden, London.
London's famed Sadler Wells production followed and then it swept into the New York City Opera with a Live From The Lincoln Center show in 1998.
Rave reviews and awards have followed, with productions of "Paul Bunyan" in San Diego, Colorado, the Florida Grand Opera in Miami just recently and a scheduled production next September at Opera Omaha, Nebraska.
What is the appeal, dormant so long?
"Sweet stories permeate the opera, but the true meaning of the piece probes the deeper political and moral dynamics in American history and the battles between nature versus industrialization," comments David Gregson, music/dance critic of San Diego Magazine.
"(THIS IS NOT YOUR NORMAL OPERA)" warns the Florida Grand Opera, commenting: "Paul Bunyan is a musically wonderful work and a refreshing change of pace, while Auden's text is filled with cleverness. Don't miss it!"
The improbable story of a huge lumberjack so large his footsteps created the Great Lakes apparently was "alittle much" and was unfairly labeled "fakelore" by academics.
However, as I discovered in research for my book "Paul Bunyan: How A Terrible Timber Feller Became A Legend," first published in 1993, there was a real basis for the outlandishtales.
My contention is that the legend is based mainly on the exploits of one Fabian "Joe" Fournier, a brawling lumberjack who lived and died in Bay City from 1865-1875.
The tales caught the fancy of the world from the first written account by James T. McGillivray in 1906 in the Oscoda Press.
More newspaper stories, poems, magazine articles promoted by literary legend H.L. Mencken in his American Mercury, advertising graphics, many books, and even an operetta by famed British composer Benjamin Britten, in collaboration with one of the greatest 20th century poets, W.H. Auden, in 1941 showed the extent to which the folklore figure had grabbed the imagination of the public.
Having grown up in the 1940s in Bay City, the story infused itself in my consciousness perhaps more than most. But by the time I got my book into print, public interest had largely waned.
Granted, the hardcover edition sold out and the book went into the second printing, in soft cover, but it was far from the hundreds of thousands of copies of the fanciful tales sold by authors of related tales during the World War II era.
So it came as a mild shock to me to find recently that the Paul Bunyan Opera is enjoying an almost fantastic revival, starting about eight years ago in Britain and now spreading fast across the United States.
Also, the score from the two act operetta, on a CD by Philip Brunelle, has been highly popular in the past decade, and a Plymouth Series CD on Virgin Classics is now out of print.
"Together, Auden and Britten concocted a marvelously witty and nostalgic look at mythic America," writes critic Gregson, in San Diego Magazine. "In an affecting, unpretentious way, the two artists portray the birth of a fresh new world, innocent and full of promise. Then they show that world gradually succumbing to age, decay and the crushing disappointment of experience. The final scenes evoke Brecht and Weill:'The campfire embers are black and cold, the banjos are broken, the stories told, the woods are cut down, and the young grown old.'"
Though unseen in the production "Bunyan manifests himself as a booming disembodied voice from above, and his spoken monologues often interrupt the music with narration..."
Familiar figures from the dozens of fanciful tales that emerged from the Bay City wellspring of the imagination are featured in the operetta: lumberjacks, Babe the Blue Ox, book-keeper Johnny Inkslinger, the cook Sourdough Slim, and Bunyan's ordinary-sized daughter, Tiny.
If Bay City seeks a dramatic, epic production to headline its tourism promotion, it would seem that a production of the Paul Bunyan operetta might be a likely choice.###
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Dave Rogers |
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