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Lincoln opera portrays his 'journey to greatness'

By Rich Copley rcopley@herald-leader.com

If you had told Nick Provenzale a few years ago that he would play Abraham Lincoln in an opera, he would have assumed he needed to work on his beard and get fitted for a stovepipe hat.

And if you had told Julie LaDouceur that she'd be the female lead, she would have assumed she'd be playing Mary Todd Lincoln.

But composer Joe Baber and librettist Jim Rodgers, who were commissioned by University of Kentucky Opera Theatre director Everett McCorvey to write a Lincoln opera, were not interested in that period of his life.

"We decided that if we were going to do it, we could not do the icon," Rodgers says. "We felt that was too sacred, and we didn't feel comfortable with that. We both said that if we were going to do it, we'd like it to be from a younger point of view.

"I wanted to do a Lincoln before greatness, on the journey to greatness."

Baber says, "That's the only way I thought we could do it. I've seen some bad operas on political figures. It just doesn't work."

River of Time, which will have its world premiere this week at the Lexington Opera House, shows Lincoln as a young man who suffered the loss of the three most important women in his life: his mother, his sister and possibly his true love. He's a young man who has a deeply fractured relationship with his father. He also has a strong sense of the injustice of slavery, although he hasn't quite grasped his own power to defeat it.

"The intellect was there," Provenzale says during a break from a rehearsal, "but he hadn't realized his leadership potential."

Provenzale has lived with this role for two years and watched it develop from one aria to a full-blown part.

A segment of River of Time was featured in the UK Opera Theatre and Kentucky Humanities Council's production of Our Lincoln, which played at the Singletary Center for the Arts in February 2008 and a year later at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.

Both times, Provenzale performed Lincoln's signature aria, Free, and during the past two years, he has pieced the part together as Baber and Rodgers worked.

"It was interesting to see new pieces come and the character start to form," Provenzale says.

Baber thinks the seeds for a Lincoln opera were planted in McCorvey's mind at a performance of his last big work, the Civil War choral work An American Requiem, which premiered locally with the Lexington Singers in 1999 and was presented again by the Singers and the Lexington Philharmonic in 2003.

Baber says he feels as if he has been in "a mid-American voice" for the past decade, the ideal place for Lincoln.

It was Rodgers, 73, a retired UK theater professor, who had to wrap his brain around writing opera.

Lyric and rhythm

"I said, 'Joe, how much poetry, how much rhyme do we have to have here?' and he said, 'I'd like to have all of it rhyme,'" Rodgers recalls.

Then, they went through a process of Rodgers learning how the lyric and rhythm can be manipulated to create rhyme where it doesn't exist.

More than rhyming, the first-time librettist had to get used to writing for music so that the right words arrive at the right notes.

"If the emphasis in the word was on the second syllable, Joe would say, 'Jim, the emphasis is on the next syllable, not that one, so that word doesn't lie comfortably with the music,'" Rodgers says.

Says Baber: "Jim actually got to be very, very good at this. I know he hated it, but it produced some striking parts."

Baber, 72, a UK music composition professor with several operas to his credit, also had to learn to let go of the operatic form a bit as River of Time naturally slid into several forms of music and stage, including some spoken passages.

What Rodgers relished was learning the history of the 16th president and the stories that would ideally suit themselves to opera.

One was the story of Ann Rutledge. Historians debate the nature of the relationship between Rutledge and Lincoln, but more recent history has the two Kentucky natives falling in love before her death from typhoid in 1835.

By including Rutledge (sung by LaDouceur), Baber and Rodgers say, River revives one of the oldest traditions of opera: taking a story about a guy and making it about the beautiful, soaring soprano — think Susannah in W.A. Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro.

"The girl ends up becoming the opera," Baber says. "You almost can't help it."

La Douceur, who alternates with Amanda Balltrip in the role of Rutledge, seems amused by the idea that her character takes over the opera. "I don't think there's any doubt this opera is about Abe Lincoln," she says.

Hints of his greatness

Rutledge is one of several characters who predict Lincoln's greatness and fight against slavery.

It becomes a theme embodied in several scenes, particularly at the end of Act I, when Lincoln is at a slave market in New Orleans and declares, "If I ever get a chance to hit this thing, I'm going to hit it hard," and "If slavery isn't wrong, nothing is wrong."

For quite a bit of the 21/2 years Baber and Rodgers worked on River of Time, they felt as if they were "flying blind," Baber says. Then they show started to come together, and they realized there was the central theme of Lincoln's conviction and promise. And that gave them their connection to the Lincoln who made the history books.

"At the end of the opera, he becomes the Lincoln we know," Baber says. "He puts the hat on and leaves."