“I gave you eyes to see the world
And all the beauties in it
So don’t mock Me by being blind”
Left to right: Patricia Racette as Love Simpson, John McVeigh as Will Tweedy, and Dean Peterson as Rucker Lattimore in Cold Sassy Tree
Houston Grand Opera, 2000
PHOTO: GEORGE HIXSON
Cold Sassy Tree
(2000) 190’
A musical play in three acts
Text Libretto by the composer, based on the novel by Olive Anne Burns
Scoring 2S, 2M, 2T, Bar, BBar; chorus
2.2.2.2-4.2.2.1-timp.perc-pft-cel-harp-strings
One of the composer’s favorites among his own operas, Cold Sassy Tree was premiered in 2000 by the Houston Grand Opera. When HGO Artistic Director Patrick Summers first heard the score, he told the composer, “You’ve written your Falstaff.” The comic stage work centers on the May-September romance between septuagenarian Rucker Lattimore and the much younger Miss Love Simpson, and embraces a great amount of eccentricity in the characters and in the musical language.
Rucker Lattimore, proprietor of the general store in a small town in Georgia, announces he intends to marry his employee Love Simpson. He explains the marriage will be a “business arrangement”: Love will cook and clean in exchange for the house and its furnishings. Rucker’s grown daughters, as well as the town, are aghast— Rucker has buried his wife, their mother, just three weeks before, and Love is half his age. The story challenges the hypocrisies of the town community, while following the transformation of Love and Rucker’s relationship to one of healing and renewal.
Notable Moment: “Rented rooms, that’s all I’ve ever known”
Love (soprano), Act I, Scene 3
Knowing that Rucker’s grown children are not happy that he has deeded the family house to her, Love Simpson attempts to explain that this will be the first time she has ever had a real home. The Los Angeles Times proclaimed, “Young singers should think about adding this and at least four other arias [from this opera] to their concert repertory immediately.”
John McVeigh as Will Tweedy in Cold Sassy Tree
Atlanta Opera, 2008
PHOTO: TIM WILKERSON/THE ATLANTA OPERA
“The first meeting that I had with Carlisle was to discuss his idea for the opera Cold Sassy Tree, based on Olive Ann Burns’ extraordinary book. I read the book and thought, ‘Well, this is a wonderful book, but this is completely impossible to make into an opera.’ It’s a real novel narrative, not a stage narrative. But then Carlisle— who has always written his own librettos— turned in the libretto to us.
To this day I’m flabbergasted by that libretto— the language and the architecture that he found. I think Cold Sassy Tree has one of the greatest librettos of an opera that you’ll ever find. I remember reading the libretto and thinking you could practically hear the score come out of the libretto because it was so integrated in Carlisle’s creative process by that time.”
— Conductor Patrick Summers
“There’s nothing cold about Carlisle Floyd’s new opera, Cold Sassy Tree. It speaks directly from the heart to the heart, with side trips through the funny bone”