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The Garden of Mystery
Opera by Charles Wakefield Cadman
Cadman in 1919
Librettist	Nelle Richmond Eberhart
Language	English
Based on	"Rappaccini's Daughter" by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1844)
Premiere	20 March 1925 (1925-03-20) Carnegie Hall, New York City

The Garden of Mystery is an English-language American opera in one act and three scenes. The composer was Charles Wakefield Cadman with a libretto by Nelle Richmond Eberhart. The opera was based on Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1844 short story "Rappaccini's Daughter".

The work premiered in a concert version at Carnegie Hall in New York City on March 20, 1925, with the American National Orchestra conducted by Howard Barlow. A staged performance did not occur until 1996.

Hawthorne's Gothic story about a doctor whose work with poisons has made his daughter's touch deadly has inspired several operas, including The Poisoned Kiss, or The Empress and the Necromancer (Ralph Vaughan Williams, 1936);' Rappaccini's Daughter (Margaret Garwood, 1980), and La hija de Rappaccini (Daniel Catán, 1991).

Plot

The opera is set in 16th century Italy at Padua. The story takes place in the garden of Dr. Giacomo Rappacini. Overlooking the garden is a neighboring home.

Rappacini is an expert on botany and toxic plants. The plants in his garden are beautiful but deadly. He lives with his daughter, Beatrice. Beatrice's cousin Bianca is visiting. Bianca's love is Enrico.

Giovanni Guasconti is a university student who lives in a room that overlooks Rappacini's garden. He observes that the doctor seems to be afraid of plants in the garden but which Beatrice handles freely. He sees a bug drop dead from her breath. Giovanni is enchanted by this mysterious and beautiful woman.

Bianca and Enrico sit in the garden by the fountain and sing of their love and how they must flee the deadly garden.

Giovanni enters the garden and woos Beatrice. They start to embrace but she pulls back. Beatrice tells Giovanni that she has been raised on poisons and her kiss would be deadly. They both exit.

Giovanni retreats and visits a friend of his father's who gives him an antidote to Beatrice's poison. The next morning, Giovanni finds that he too is poisonous when his breath kills a spider. He goes to the garden with the antidote.

Beatrice, having lived her whole life on poison, believes she could not live without the toxins. She drinks the antidote and is proven correct. As she starts to die, she tells Giovanni to drink because the antidote will save him. She died in her father's arms. Giovanni drinks the antidote and lives.

Composition and premiere

Eberhart collaborated with Cadman on five operas. In May 1912, she suggested to Cadman basing an opera on the Hawthorne story and she began working that year. The original title was Beatrice, the name of Rappacini's daughter, then The Garden of Death, before they settled on The Garden of Mystery. The first draft of the libretto was completed in October 1912 and the final version in 1914. Cadman finished the music in 1915. Grove's Dictionary noted the opera was still in manuscript form in 1919. The opera did not receive a performance until 1925 when it was given on March 20 in a concert version at Carnegie Hall given as a benefit performance for the Association of Music School Settlements of Greater New York. Howard Barlow conducted the American National Orchestra, a unit which Barlow himself organized; its musicians were all American-born and American-trained. Charles Trier directed. The score was published in 1925. Cadman's publisher was still advertising the score in 1951.

A 1927 study of American opera claimed Garden "was probably the second absolutely native American operatic performance. Hawthorne, the author of the original story; Eberhart, who transformed it into an opera libretto; and Cadman, the composer, all were born in America. The same was true of the cast, orchestra, conductor and stage personnel;" the first native opera being Cadman and Eberhart's Shanewis.

Charles Watt, publisher of Chicago's The Music News, was enthusiastic: "Here clearly was the Cadman flair, the Cadman effect, and the unique Cadman style. The flow of melody was almost continuous, the massing of tone was simple but striking and the injection of color was both appropriate and striking." Watt had praise for all the singers performances, particularly Ernest Davis as Giovanni.

But the New York critics were harsh. Francis D. Perkins of The New York Herald Tribune said the opera was "a hardly feasible libretto set to undistinguished music". William James Henderson of The New York Sun said "it is impossible to describe in critical terms such a sorry attempt." Deems Taylor of The New York World said it was hard to judge the work itself from a performance that was "pretty bad". The New Yorker wrote "Mr. Cadman's work had not been in progress more than ten minutes before it became reasonably obvious that no history was being made. The psychological story is undramatic and Mr. Cadman's ear-filling but uneventful music does not compensate for the lack of interest in the fable." The same review observed "the fashionable audience departed early and often".

The Pacific Coast Musician summarized the criticism of the 1925 premiere, writing it was "not satisfactorily produced . . . the cast was inefficient, the orchestra was unsatisfactory". The same review said Eberhart's libretto was done "with an eye to the literary quality rather than with an appreciation of dramatic values, a fatal thing to the success of opera, where action is necessary to hold the audience's interest". B. M. Steigman in the journal Music & Letters called it "pathetic" and "wretched", with a libretto "beyond hope".

Soon after the premiere, Cadman observed that the "brutal" notices of an amateur performance for charity led "to its lack of success . . . not withstanding that it took twelve curtain calls".

Howard Perison said in 1982 that Garden was "a remarkable departure from Cadman's usual style, becoming at times chromatic and dissonant and employing unusual modal melodic patterns in an attempt to convey the sinister aspects of the story".

Revivals

The second performance of the opera was over WOR-AM and the CBS Radio Network's Pioneer Hour on May 7, 1928. Howard Barlow, who conducted the premiere, conducted the performance. The cast was Frank Croxton as Dr. Rappaccini, Elizabeth Lennox as Beatrice, Charles W. Harrison as Giovanni, Elise Thiede as Bianca, and Vernon Archibald as Enrico. The NBC Red Network broadcast the opera later that year in a performance conducted by A. Walter Kramer. In 1931, the CBS Radio Network aired Garden as part of its series Grand Opera Miniatures. Howard Barlow again conducted, directing the Columbia Symphony Orchestra.

The American Chamber Opera Company gave the first staged performance of Garden on February 16, 1996. Garden was performed in New York City at the Kate Murphy Theatre at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Anthony Tommasini of The New York Times was critical of both the work and the production. "The opera has a hokey, incomprehensible libretto about a maniacal doctor, a poisonous plant and two pairs of ill-fated lovers. The score is a hodgepodge that borrows shamelessly from Richard Strauss." Of the performers, Tommasini said "the orchestra, conducted by Douglas Anderson, floundered through this wayward music. Cadman's vocal parts are punishing, and the principals . . . struggled through them with forced and edgy singing."

Roles

See also

• The Poisoned Kiss, or The Empress and the Necromancer, 1936 opera by Ralph Vaughan Williams based on the same source material
• Rappacini's Daughter, 1980 opera by Margaret Garwood based on the same source material.
• Rappacini's Daughter, 1991 opera by Daniel Catán based on the same source material.
• Rappaccini's Daughter, a list of other operas based on the same source material

References

1. Mattfeld, Julius (1927). A Hundred Years of Grand Opera in New York, 1825–1925: A Record of Performances. New York: New York Public Library. p. 55. OCLC 457461576. Retrieved January 1, 2025.
2. Perison, Harry D. (1982). "The 'Indian' Operas of Charles Wakefield Cadman". College Music Symposium. 22 (2): 20–48. ISSN 0069-5696. Retrieved January 1, 2025.
3. Griffel, Margaret Ross (2013). Operas in English: A Dictionary. Vol. 1. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press. p. 300. ISBN 9780810883253.
4. Cadman & Eberhard 1925, p. 1.
5. ^ Griffel 2013, p. 300.
6. ^ Perison 1982.
7. Pratt, Waldo Selden, ed. (1920). Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Vol. 6 (2nd ed.). Philadelphia: Theodore Presser. p. 150. Retrieved January 1, 2025.
8. Watt, Charles E. (April 3, 1925). "Premiere of Charles Wakefield Cadman Opera The Garden of Mystery, Carnegie Hall, March 20". The Music News. Vol. 17, no. 14. Chicago: Charles E. Watt. pp. 2–3. Retrieved January 2, 2025.
9. Ewen, David (1948). Dictators of the Baton (2nd ed.). New York: Ziff-Davis. p. 293. Retrieved January 2, 2025.
10. ^ Watt 1925, p. 2.
11. Cadman, Charles Wakefield; Eberhard, Nelle Richmond (1925). The Garden of Mystery, A Grand Opera in One Act, Three Scenes. New York: J. Fischer & Bro. OCLC 5294906. Retrieved January 1, 2025.
12. J. Fischer & Bro. (February 1951). "Operas by American Composers". Musical America. Vol. 71, no. 3. New York. p. 233. Retrieved January 2, 2025.
13. Hipsher, Edward Ellsworth (1927). American Opera and Its Composers: A Complete History of Serious American Opera, with a Summary of the Lighter Forms Which Led up to Its Birth. Philadelphia: Theodore Presser. p. 104. OCLC 1334654200. Retrieved January 1, 2025.
14. "An American Opera". The Musical Observer. Vol. 24, no. 5. New York. May 1925. p. 28. Retrieved January 1, 2025.
15. ^ Musical Observer 1925, p. 28.
16. "Music". The New Yorker. Vol. 1, no. 7. April 4, 1925. p. 17. Retrieved January 1, 2025.
17. New Yorker 1925, p. 17.
18. "Injustice to Cadman". Pacific Coast Musician. Vol. 14, no. 15. Los Angeles, California: Frank H. Colby. April 11, 1925. p. 6. Retrieved January 1, 2025.
19. Pacific Coast Musician 1925, p. 6.
20. Steigman, B. M. (1925). "The Great American Opera". Music & Letters. 6 (4): 359–367. doi:10.1093/ml/VI.4.359. Retrieved January 1, 2025.
21. "Among the Washington Organists: Musical Personages and Happenings in the Nation's Capital". Melody: A Monthly Magazine for Photoplay Musicians and the Musical Home. Vol. 9, no. 6. Boston, Massachusetts: Walter Jacobs, Inc. June 1925. pp. 4, 30. Retrieved January 2, 2025.
22. Tirindelli, Margherita (May 17, 1928). "Music on the Air". Musical Courier. Vol. 96, no. 20. New York. p. 35. Retrieved January 2, 2025.
23. ^ Tirindelli 1928, p. 35.
24. Lucas, Clarence (September 13, 1928). "Interpreting Classical Music". Musical Courier. Vol. 97, no. 11. New York. p. 8. Retrieved January 2, 2025.
25. Columbia Broadcasting System (1939). Serious Music on the Columbia Broadcasting System: A Survey of Series, Soloists and Special Performances from 1927 through 1938. New York: Columbia Broadcasting System. p. 10. Retrieved January 2, 2025.
26. Columbia Broadcasting System 1939, p. 10.
27. Wlaschin, Ken (2024). Encyclopedia of American Opera. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland. p. 272. ISBN 9781476612386. Retrieved January 1, 2025.
28. Tommasini, Anthony (February 21, 1996). "Neglected One-Act Operas". The New York Times. p. C15. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved January 1, 2025.
29. ^ Tommasini 1996, p. C15.
30. Cadman & Eberhard 1925, p. title page verso.

• Opera

• Operas
• 1925 operas
• One-act operas
• English-language operas
• Operas set in Italy
• Operas set in the 16th century
• Operas based on works by Nathaniel Hawthorne