PBS has come full circle with its “Great Performances” telecast of the Tobias Picker opera, “Emmeline,” to be seen locally on WTTW-Ch. 11 at 10 p.m. Wednesday.
The true story of Emmeline Mosher, a textile mill worker in 19th Century New England forced to give up her infant son whom she unknowingly marries many years later, came to Picker’s attention via a 1990 PBS “American Experience” documentary. Judith Rossner had also used Emmeline’s saga as the basis for her fact-based 1980 novel, “Emmeline.”
This is the Oedipus myth transplanted to the stony soil of Lowell, Mass., and told from Jocasta’s point of view. The world premiere production, taped last summer at the Santa Fe Opera, is a triumph, even more powerful on the small screen than in the theater.
Picker’s neo-Romantic score, set to a taut libretto by J.D. McClatchy, floats singable vocal lines over broad fields of tonal harmony that often suggest the nostalgic idiom of Aaron Copland, spiced with a bit of dissonance and rhythmic angularity. For a first opera, it is a mightily impressive achievement.
We first meet Emmeline as a Maine farm girl, sent off at age 13 to work in a textile mill to support her family. There she is seduced and becomes pregnant by the factory foreman. Her baby is given up for adoption. Twenty years later she falls in love with and marries a young stranger. Only later is he revealed to be the son she never knew. She is left truly alone, ostracized by a pitiless community.
That this peculiarly American tragedy never descends to melodrama owes much to the extraordinary performance by Patricia Racette in the title role, to Francesca Zambello’s sensitive direction and the stark production by Robert Israel.
Besides Racette’s, there are exemplary performances from Anne-Marie Owens as Emmeline’s stern aunt, Josepha Gayer as the indomitable boarding-house mistress, Curt Peterson as the son and Kevin Langan as the father. George Manahan conducts with obvious dedication. “Emmeline” is one of the most important and successful American operas of the decade. Bravo to PBS for bringing it to a wider public.
