See America First - Massachusetts
A very interesting parallel exists between that work and the little-known 1976 Carlisle Floyd opera, Bilby's Doll, which is based on the 1928 novel A Mirror for Witches by Esther Forbes. Doll Bilby, foster daughter of Jared Bilby, a sea captain who rescued her as a small child after she saw her parents burned to death for witchcraft in her native Brittany, has been left half of Bilby's property upon his death -- to the fury of his widow, Hannah. She accuses Doll of having been a "goblin-child" who had "blasted" her own unborn children in the womb (actually false pregnancies, not miscarriages). Her heritage ever weighing upon her, Doll willingly enters into an affair with Shad, whom she believes is the Devil -- in fact, he is a highly-sought pirate who sails away to his ultimate doom, leaving her pregnant. When the local deacon's two little girls, Sorrow and Labour, take ill, Hannah is eager to blame Doll. As in The Crucible, in which a "poppet" -- a doll -- is found pierced with a needle and is thus believed to be an instrument of voodoo, a pair of poppets given to the girls by Doll Bilby are thought to be behind their illness. The Reverend Increase Mather, come from Boston to examine the twins, lists various women, and the girls obligingly shriek when he gets to Doll's name. Truly believing that her parents' "crime" is genetic, Doll confesses to being a witch, and dies in prison in childbirth convinced that the baby's father is the Devil.
Finally, we must turn to Howard Hanson's 1934 Merry Mount, , based on Hawthorne's The Maypole of Merry Mount. Set in a Massachusetts Puritan village in 1625, it concerns the delusions of an impassioned (in every sense) young preacher, Wrestling Bradford. When he confesses to an elder of the congregation his lustful dreams concerning an imaginary woman he dubs "Astoreth," the man volunteers his own daughter, Plentiful, to banish Bradford's inner demons by becoming his Bradford's wife (Incredibly, her own father sings, "Why, any jade can do it; one serves as well as t'other" Let's just say credibility isn't this rather overwrought libretto's high point.). But Bradford finds Plentiful a dull substitute compared with what he has imagined. When a group of English Cavaliers arrive in town, he falls like a stone for Lady Marigold Sandys, who bears an unfortunate resemblance
Latest Articles