“I will touch you on my darker nights,” Wichita State assistant professor Hilary Grace Taylor sings in the final section of Lance Hulme’s world premiere of “December Night” — a mark of the final destination in the shared spiritual search for freedom from agony between the helpless slave, Sada, and the hopeless archbishop, Father Latour (played by Logan Tarwater).
The opera’s libretto, written by Alicia Richards, is a vignette from the titular chapter in Willa Cather’s “Death Comes for the Archbishop.” Deemed as one of the great American novels, it may seem like a challenge to wrap Willa Cather’s writing into an articulate adaptation for audiences.
Yet with a history of adapting “And the Sea Shall Give Up Its Dead” by Thornton Wilder and “The Ebony Tower” by John Fowles into two full-length adapted operas, the opening of Hulme’s newest opera on Nov. 7 and 8 unveiled that he was well equipped for properly depicting this somber and afflicting winter tale.
As a discrete WSU student choir within Miller Concert Hall’s audience awakened the stage, it was established that a judicious usage of the non-theatrical space would make up for the lack of curtains and props. Seated at the corner of the stage was a student playing a Native American flute and another student was at the organ, together playing an ominous and mellow tune.
The tormented archbishop, Father Latour, enters. While a lack of introduction emphasized a need to decipher each decibel in the opera solos, the storyline was simple and pronounced enough for it to only be a matter of understanding the human emotion to access “December Night’s” meaning.
“His soul had become a barren field,” Willa Cather writes, referring to an emptiness and despair Father Latour succumbed to in the time his friend, Father Vaillant (played by Logan Reid) was away. As Tarwater continues to reflect on his loneliness and inability to help his people in “all that I’ve done” he believes, “I have nothing left to give” all the more, singing, “I am alone — my heart is a stone — on a cold December night.”
Feeling the burden as a leader of a mid-19th century territory in New Mexico, Tarwater belts a distressing stream of consciousness, until he is interrupted by a lively and optimistic Father Vaillant. Joining him onstage from behind the center-stage organ, Reid acts as a witness to the archbishop’s imagination — whether or not he is real or a character in his own head, though, is unclear.
It is not until Sada, who savagely runs on-stage from outside the theater, finds herself in Tarwater’s grasp, that the two feel closure on this “cold December night.”
While it is not clearly outlined in the opera, Willa Cather writes, “He received the miracle in her heart into his own, saw through her eyes, knew that his poverty was as bleak as hers.”
As the two pray together, it becomes clear Tarwater is growing more and more tethered to his reality as he helps the woman regain agency over her relationship with God.
While it is unclear at times the specifics of their language — one sentiment is clear, the phrase that had reigned most in the beginning was “on this cold December night” is now “this sweet and holy night.”
