By Victoria Bond
The long road leading to the writing of an opera based on the life of Victoria Woodhull began 20 years ago with a suggestion from my mother. She visited Fort Bragg in northern California and stayed at a hotel that had a plaque and a brief story about the first woman to run for President of the United States, Victoria Woodhull. When my mother, a fiercely independent woman, told me the history of Woodhull’s struggle for women’s rights and her remarkable act of running for President at a time when women could not even vote, I was intrigued. Here was an appropriate subject for an opera.
My first opera was based on Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and was produced by Opera Roanoke in Virginia in 1995. Although I had written several ballets and a musical for children, this was my first full-length opera and composing it was a heady and empowering experience. It made me want to begin another one, and I remembered Victoria Woodhull. As if by magic, three new books about her appeared in print within the next two years. They provided the historical research that I needed and confirmed the rightness of the timing for this project.
A further confirmation was to come in the person of the noted director, Patricia Heuermann. As President of The National Opera Association, Patricia had invited me to be a speaker at the Association’s 1999 Convention. As we met to discuss the convention, I mentioned to her my plan to write an opera about Victoria Woodhull. She was intrigued by the subject matter and offered to speak to Richard Marshall, Artistic Director of The Center for Contemporary Opera, about mounting a workshop production. I brought Richard a sampling of my music and told him about the opera. The Center had never presented an opera in workshop, and gave only full productions with orchestra, sets and costumes of both 20th-century classics and, most notably, world premieres. He was intrigued, however, and agreed to produce the workshop, providing I could prepare the work for the following spring. It was too tempting of an offer. I would get it done, no matter what! Having worked on film scores in Los Angeles, I knew what it took to get music written on a tight deadline. And this was a challenge!
The next step was to find the right librettist. My first attempt was a West-coast writer who had been highly recommended. I was impressed with her writing and she with my compositions, and we felt that distance should not be a barrier. We carried on an e-mail, fax and phone collaboration for about a year. It did not work. The long pauses between volley and return allowed the momentum to drop and the whole energy level to become bogged down. I needed to find someone closer to home, preferably in New York City, where communication could be more immediate.
Friends suggested Marsha Norman. The playwright had written The Secret Garden and had won the Pulitzer Prize for her play, Night, Mother. But would such a famous and busy person be interested in this project? I met her at her New York loft. She was warm and cordial. Although she was interested, there were too many other projects needing her immediate attention. She recommended an outstanding young Australian playwright, Hilary Bell, who had been her student at Juilliard. But before we parted that day, she asked me a significant question: “How does the opera end?” I thought for a moment: “Always know how it ends before you begin.” I told her my plan. She approved and agreed to offer ongoing guidance.
Hilary and I began by reading everything we could about Victoria Woodhull and her historic context. Lois Beachy Underhill, the author of The Woman Who Ran For President, became our history consultant and provided us with valuable information and photographs. We also read Notorious Victoria by Mary Gabriel and Other Selves by Barbara Goldsmith, as well as The Victoria Woodhull Reader, a compilation of articles and speeches actually written by Woodhull. We discovered that not only did she run for President, with Frederick Douglass as her Vice-Presidential running mate, but she also was the first woman stockbroker on Wall Street and she ran her own newspaper called We decided to concentrate on the Presidential election year, 1872, when Woodhull ran against Ulysses S. Grant. During that year, she exposed a sex scandal in her newspaper involving the most well-respected preacher of the day, Henry Ward Beecher, and a young woman named Elizabeth Tilton. That scandal rocked the nation for months and became as celebrated as the O. J. Simpson trial in modern times. The famous cartoonist, Thomas Nast, gave Woodhull the name “Mrs. Satan” in a celebrated caricature of her with horns and black wings which appeared in Harper’s Weekly. “Mrs. Satan” seemed the appropriate name for the opera. She was considered diabolical and a threat to society. This negative publicity brought about Woodhull’s political and financial ruin, and she ended her career by spending election night, and many nights after that, in jail. She had stood up to the most powerful man in the country, and he had crushed her with all the weight of public opinion and morality on his side. The story had the arc of a Greek Tragedy: ambition, vision and a rapid rise to fame followed by an even swifter fall from grace to disgrace. This was the raw material for a dramatic opera plot!
Hilary sketched an outline, distilling the action and characters into a tight, action-driven narrative. We were after drama, not historical accuracy. The story line began to emerge. I created a story board of drawings representing each scene in the opera, much like an animated film, so that we could shuffle them like a deck of cards, experimenting with their sequence until the perfect order was achieved. We spent long mornings and afternoons together, batting ideas back and forth, returning to our separate studios to work on them in the evening and returning the following morning to share our private revelations. It was intense, fast-paced and exhilarating.
There were scenes that came to us immediately, others which seemed less clear, and those which stubbornly refused to make themselves easily known. One of the most memorable in this last category, for me as composer, was a scene towards the end of the opera in which each of the principal characters has come to the end of his/her rope: Victoria’s political ambitions have been dashed; her husband’s dream of a tranquil, married life is in shambles; the preacher, Henry Ward Beecher, is horrified to discover the affection that his young sister Isabella feels towards his arch-enemy, Victoria; and Isabella herself, who is shocked to learn of her adored older brother’s hypocrisy and sexual transgressions. How could I combine these separate threads and weave them into a quartet so that each individual voice could be distinctly understood, and yet their combination could represent a universal sense of revelation and disappointment?
I wrestled with this for weeks. Nothing worked. Like Ulysses’ Penelope, I wove by day and tore apart by night. No two notes seemed to want to live next to each other. It was frustrating as I tried everything I could to make it work. And then, early one morning, the right solution made itself known. Nonchalantly, it sauntered into my consciousness, as though it had just been waiting for the proper moment to appear. I was stunned. Everything suddenly came into sharp focus. Solutions to problems that I had been wrestling with for days were solved, and the whole quartet clicked. I was delirious with joy and immediately called Hilary, and, propping the phone on the piano, attempted to share my revelation with her. Needless to say, singing four voices in simultaneous counterpoint plus an independent accompaniment is not something that can be accomplished by one human being. I must have sounded mad. Hilary humored my wild outburst, and it was not until this past May, when, with the full forces of an orchestra and four outstanding soloists, she could finally hear what I had heard in my head.
The Center for Contemporary Opera, together with Greenwich House Arts, had presented a workshop reading of Mrs. Satan in April 2000 with a chamber ensemble. I had written the principal roles in the opera for specific singers, tailoring the music to their vocal qualities. Soprano Ellen Shade was the inspiration for Woodhull herself, and I knew her work at the Metropolitan Opera. We had remained friends since our school years, and she agreed to sing the role and to work with me on its creation. Ellen devoted many hours to our work together, bringing not only the glorious beauty and expressivity of her voice to the role, but also her encyclopedic knowledge of the opera literature. Together with baritone Robert Osborne and tenor Nicholas Loren, we became a team. The input, insight and inspiration I received from these remarkable singers drove the work to new heights and made it singer-friendly. They each became collaborators. The workshop performance featured them together with an extraordinary cast and chorus.
Last year, I was thrilled to learn that my opera had been accepted by the New York City Opera and would be included in their yearly spring series called “Showcasing American Composers.” I had submitted a score and a tape of the Center for Contemporary Opera’s workshop and had tensely waited for Deborah Drattell, the City Opera’s Composer-in-Residence, to call and give me a thumbs up or down. Her acceptance call was certainly one of the happiest moments I can remember. Then began the difficult task of orchestrating the four sections that would be included in the reading (representing about one-fourth of the opera) and preparing the score and parts. The culmination of all the hard work occurred this year on May 9th, when, with the full and glorious forces of the New York City Opera before me, I was able to share my vision with the audience.
Music Director George Manahan agreed to let me conduct the reading. I knew most of the orchestra members, as I had worked at the New York City Opera as Christopher Keene’s assistant many years earlier. I have had the good fortune to conduct opera since I was a student, having served as Sixten Ehrling’s assistant to the Juilliard Opera Department. Later, I took over the Artistic Directorship of the Bel Canto Opera Company in New York. After I graduated from Juilliard, I was appointed Music Director of the Roanoke Symphony in Virginia and subsequently assumed the post of Artistic Director of Opera Roanoke, as well. Currently, I am Artistic Director of the Harrisburg Opera in Pennsylvania. I am comfortable conducting opera, and so the prospect of being at the helm of my own opera was quite natural. I met the soloists the week before the reading and worked with them and their excellent coach. We established a good rapport, and I was interested in the new interpretations they brought to the work.
During the actual performance I was so focused on the specific details of ensemble, tempo and cues that I did not have time to evaluate the opera itself. So much of a composer’s life is spent in solitude that I often wonder whether or not my private vision has any meaning at all to anyone else. With the last notes, the cheers and bravos of the audience made me realize that the opera had touched them and had achieved something that can never be taken for granted: communication.
The ship has been launched: the bottle of champagne baptizing it and sending it off on its first voyage. Now it will be polished and refined and orchestrated, ready for a full production with sets and costumes. I drink to its good health and long life!
Composer Victoria Bond has written for every medium, from operas and orchestral works to ballet scores and chamber music. Her compositions have been widely performed and recorded in the United States, Europe, South America and Asia. She has been commissioned by The American Ballet Theater, The Pennsylvania Ballet, The Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, The Shanghai Symphony, The Houston Symphony, The Women’s Philharmonic, Sequitur, Joy in Singing, Symphony Space and the Audubon Quartet.
Her orchestral works have been performed by major orchestras in the United States and abroad and her chamber music has been championed by such prestigious ensembles as The Audubon String Quartet, The Pro Arte String Quartet and the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble. Her numerous works for young audiences include a musical, Everyone is Good for Something, commissioned by Stage One in Louisville, KY; and two works for “Sesame Street’s” Bob McGrath, The Frog Prince and What’s the Point of Counterpoint?.
Born into a family of professional musicians, Victoria Bond began her formal training at the Mannes School of Music, studying piano with Nadia Reisenberg. She holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Southern California, where she studied composition with Ingolf Dahl. She continued her education as a fellowship student at the Juilliard School, earning master’s and doctoral degrees with honors; she studied composition with Roger Sessions and Vincent Persichetti and conducting with Jean Morel and Sixten Ehrling.
Major compositions include Dreams of Flying, commissioned by the Audubon String Quartet; Urban Bird, commissioned by the Women’s Philharmonic in San Francisco; Thinking Like A Mountain, jointly commissioned by the Billings Symphony in Montana, the Elgin Symphony in Illinois, and the Shanghai Symphony in China and featured on a Protone CD, “Live from Shanghai.” Bond’s orchestral Variations on a Theme of Brahms was written at Brahmshaus in Germany on a fellowship and premiered by the Manhattan Philharmonia in New York City in 1998. Other recordings of her music include “Victoria Bond: Compositions” on the Qualiton label, “Black Light” on the Koch label, “An American Collage” on the Protone label and “Character Sketches” on the Leonarda label. Soon to be released on Albany Records is A Modest Proposal for tenor and orchestra (Cleveland Chamber Orchestra, Paul Sperry, soloist) and Molly ManyBloom, a setting of the Molly Bloom portion of James Joyce’s Ulysses, scored for soprano and string quartet. Bond has been profiled in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, and was featured on the NBC “Today Show.”The Plot
Performances of Mrs. Satan
Composer Profile