"Seven Rabbits on a Pole," a new opera, comes to AHS
Composer Pasquale Tassone and librettist Elizabeth Searle invite you to attend a free performance of scenes from their opera, "Seven Rabbits on a Pole," at the Arlington High School auditorium on Saturday, October 3, at 7:30 p.m. Based on a play by John Picardi, the opera brings to life the struggles and ultimate reconciliation of an Italian-immigrant family in the 1930s. This concert performance will feature six professional singers and the Lowell Chamber Orchestra under the direction of Orlando Cela. Recently, Tassone and Searle met with Carla DeFord to discuss this project and their creative partnership.
How did you find each other?
Tassone: I had seen the play at the Stoneham Theatre, and afterward I was chatting with the playwright, John Picardi. I thought the play would make a good opera, so I later wrote to John, who gave me his blessing to use the play but said he was not a librettist. So I started looking on the Internet and found Elizabeth, who had written the libretto for "Nancy and Tonya: the Rock Opera." I sent her an e-mail and told her about the story. She said she found it intriguing and suggested we meet to talk about it. This was in 2009.
After several phone conversations, I decided it was time to meet, so I asked Elizabeth where she lived. To my amazement, she told me she lived in Arlington, Massachusetts, where I was living at the time. In fact, she lived only several blocks away from me! She agreed to work on the project, and so we embarked on it, with her sending me drafts and me writing the music.
Searle: We weren't starting from nothing; we were working with a very well-structured play. So I went through it and tried to pull out the moments of high emotion to figure out where the lyrics should go. In opera you're moving from one emotion to another.
Tassone: It was really a challenge for me because unlike a traditional musical in which you have both songs and dialogue, an opera is sung through. That meant I had to write a lot of music. I asked myself, "Where are the moments of most tension, drama, or angst? It was my job to represent through music not only those feelings but also the transitions between them .
There's a lot of turbulence in this Italian-immigrant family. Does the opera end on a note of hope?
Tassone: Yes, the father [Enio Padroni] comes around to certain realizations. For example, he's distraught when one of his sons moves to California. Coming from an Italian-immigrant background myself, I can tell you that a son moving away is almost unheard of in that culture. When I went off to college, my parents weren’t happy either.
Searle: In the play Enio calls this son "an American demon." What he means is that the son has been corrupted by American values: ambition run amok. Enio himself feels that he has been influenced by the American priority of making money. Eventually, Enio comes back to more old-world values: appreciating the family and supporting your children without trying to change them.
Tassone: My family and I came over from Italy in 1958 when I was just a kid. We didn't speak English, and I spent most of my youth translating for my mother. My father thought America was the greatest country in the world; it gave him an opportunity to have a job and a life, but there were some things about the culture he didn't understand. For example, having gone through the war, he did not approve of children playing with toy guns and did not allow us to have them even though at that time just about every boy in the country had a toy gun and a cowboy hat!
Does the plot of "Seven Rabbits on a Pole" have any relationship to that of "Light in the Piazza"?
Searle: The opera is not a romance, but it does include a mentally challenged young woman, Julia, Enio's daughter. She becomes pregnant by "Q," a hobo who is taken in by the family. He is first seen carrying seven dead rabbits on a pole over his shoulder, with the rabbits symbolizing all the death and loss experienced by the family, including a deep, dark secret that is only revealed at the end. I think it's a great image.
Q later dies, and it's clear that Julia will need a lot of help to raise her child. So Mrs. Wilson, Enio's neigbbor who later becomes his wife, steps in. It's a plausible upbeat ending. There's a note of hope, but everything is not tied up in a neat package.
Tassone: Even though Q dies about halfway through the opera, in the finale all six characters come back onstage and sing a kind of prayer or hymn to "la bella luna," the beautiful moon. It's very peaceful and soft.
How would you describe the style of the music?
Tassone: I knew that if I wrote an opera it had to be performable and listenable. This opera is written in a tonal style; you can walk out of the performance humming some of the arias — I hope. The real-life issues faced by the Padroni family, such as Julia's pregnancy and the death of Enio's wife contribute to the verismo of the opera — these are events that might happen in a work by Leoncavallo, Puccini, or Verdi — but except for a moment when there's a sort of tarantella rhythm, there's no traditional Italian music.
Does the opera relate to the situation of immigrants in this country today?
Tassone: It's all too timely, and much more on everyone's mind than when we began this project. Enio's family is looked down upon -- it's all crystal clear in the play. Every new group has gone through that in America.
Searle: My great-grandfather came from Ireland because of the famine. He came with virtually nothing and built a home in Providence, Rhode Island. My grandmother was a nurse, and she remembers being treated like a servant. It's still the same old story. The same forces operating against immigrants.
How much of the opera will be included in the performance?
Tassone: We're doing four of the eleven scenes, plus a prelude. There will be no acting, similar to an oratorio setting, with the singers always onstage. Of course, the four scenes only provide a taste of the complete opera.
Searle: I will be doing some narration between the scenes, so the audience will be able to follow the story and understand how it concludes. The feeling is that it's going to work out for this family. At one point Julia asks, "Can we sing about Mama and the stars?" — and in the end they do.
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