Murder Most Musical

The Music Academy of the West’s astonishing guest composer series reaches its crescendo with this pair of weekend performances of Kevin Puts’ annually produced opera Elizabeth Cree, from MAW’s Lehrer Vocal Institute. 

The one-act opera Elizabeth Cree is a macabre gothic thriller adapted from Peter Ackroyd’s similarly titled book. Set in Victorian times, it serves as both crime story and psychological probe into the mind of a murderer and mob mentality. Never mind its being a vehicle for the spectacular score from Puts, whose work was heard (and seen) in town just this past January via his somewhat staged setting of poems by Emily Dickinson, Emily — No Prisoner Be…starring Joyce DiDonato and award-winning ensemble Time for Three at the Granada. (We also were blessed with one of his early instrumental works called “Legions Will Rise” at Hahn Hall last week.) 

The prolific Puts has come a long way since merely tolerating childhood piano lessons, preferring instead to spend his time “just messing around on the piano coming up with my own stuff,” he recalled last week. Eventually I got serious about piano and composing sort of happened alongside performing, an extension of my love of cinema and film music, which is where I learned how to tell a story through music.”

Indeed, his first opera, Silent Night, a collaboration with librettist Mark Campbell, won a Pulitzer Prize, and Cree, which premiered in 2017, is their third major work together. The opera still brings him a lot of joy, including hearing it at a rehearsal when he first arrived at MAW early last week. 

“I was listening and the thought came up that this is really some of the best stuff I’ve written,” Puts said. 

The composer was immediately intrigued when Campbell brought the project to him, not least because of its compact nature. That attraction lasted throughout the process. 

“There’s a relentless driving pace and I could imagine it moving very quickly,” he said. “There’s a lot of complexity, but also simplicity and serenity in a lot of the scenes. I like the way that those two things are juxtaposed, and how the scenes flow together… And I like what the orchestra is doing. It’s very involved. (I wrote) a lot of color contrasts that really work.”

Puts said that in a way his music for Cree serves as an improved update on what he came up with for Manchurian Candidate, the least successful opera in his canon. 

“It’s a similar work, but I don’t think I was as successful in that piece. So I feel like I sort of exorcised my demons or corrected my wrongdoings.”

Demons and wrongdoings, of course, are at the heart of Cree, with both the story and Puts’ music designed to keep audiences on the edge of their seats throughout the opera’s fast-paced 90-minute duration. 

“There are three murder scenes and they’re described as graphically horrific murder scenes. We wanted each one to feel crazier than the last, to keep escalating. It helped me when the (original) director said he thought of them less as horrifying than passionate because it’s being told from the point of view of the murderer. So I almost thought of them romantically, lovingly. It was really, really, really strange, but that helped me to go deeper psychologically into his point of view, which is maybe even more harrowing and scary for the audience.”

Nearly all of Puts’ vocal works focus on dark stories. Then again, so do most operas throughout history. 

“People like dark stories for opera. Nobody wants to commission a comedy. People always have to die. I think people like to go to opera to feel heavy emotions of drama and tragedy, something powerful that hits hard… But some of my favorite operas are comedies by Mozart.” 

He’ll get his chance to emulate or at least pay tribute to the composer in a new commission to complete Mozart’s unfinished German Singspiel Zaide, a political and romantic drama with just a solitary comic antagonist.

“I don’t know how much Mozart will be in there when I do it, but I’m excited to take it on,” Puts said. 

Elizabeth Cree, conducted by Benjamin Manis and stage directed by Louisa Muller, who both are making their MAW debuts, performs at 7:30 pm on July 24 and 2 pm on July 26 at the Granada Theatre.