Transformations (opera)
Transformations was commissioned from Conrad Susa in 1972 by Minnesota Opera, a company specializing in new works by American composers.
Later that year, Susa approached the American poet Anne Sexton with the idea of using her 1971 book, Transformations, a poetic re-telling of sixteen stories by the Brothers Grimm, as the basis for the libretto.
[1] Delighted with the idea of hearing her poetry as song, she cooperated closely with Susa in selecting and arranging the ten poems which would form the basis of the opera.
She subsequently returned to Minneapolis for further performances and made a tape-recording of the opera which she listened to repeatedly and played for her friends and family.
Throughout her life she had suffered from mental illness with repeated suicide attempts followed by stays in psychiatric hospitals.
[17] Described by its composer as "An Entertainment in 2 Acts", the opera has a running time of approximately two hours and is scored for eight singers and an ensemble of eight to nine musicians.
In both Sexton's original book and the opera, this poem introduces the sequence of re-told fairy tales to follow.
As in the original book, each of the subsequent tales also has its own introduction and coda in which the poet comments to the audience on her perception of the significance of the story.
According to Susa, "the poems are arranged with the author's approval to emphasize the sub-plot which concerns a middle-aged witch who gradually transforms into a vulnerable beauty slipping into a nightmare.
The Gold Key – The speaker, Sexton herself (as a "middle-aged witch", her frequent alter-ego), addresses an audience of adults by their first names.
He eventually finds a gold key that unlocks the book of Grimm's Fairy Tales in their transformed state.
[25] This poem is set, in contrast to the rest of the opera, as an entirely solo piece, a jazz ballad sung by Sexton at a microphone.
The scene can be read as a cautionary tale about the demonic power of music, but on a deeper level about women cooperating in their own victimization.
Two young children repeatedly abandoned in a forest by their father and stepmother, narrowly escape from a cannibal witch by burning her alive in her own oven.
Sexton follows the story quite closely but makes it even more disturbing by an introduction in which a mother affectionately pretends to "eat up" her little boy (sung in the opera as "The Witch's Lullaby").
[11] The tale itself is fairly short, preceded and followed by lengthy autobiographical stanzas in which Sexton explicitly alludes to her own psychiatric history involving controversial "recovered memories" of sexual abuse by her father and dissociative trance states.
