Bacon is not the only musician who has used this subgenre to beguile audience members. A couple of years ago, I was lucky enough to catch the staging of a different folk opera, also by a talented and young female singer/songwriter. Anaïs Mitchell, who is on Ani DiFranco’s Righteous Babe Records label, created her folk opera Hadestown after becoming engrossed in the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. While Mitchell was the one to dream up and write the opera, she worked with composer Michael Chorney and director Ben T. Matchstick of Vermont-based Bread & Puppet Theater to bring the piece into musical fruition. Hadestown premiered in Vermont in 2006 and later toured around the country.
Already a prolific and talented songwriter, Mitchell decided turn her penchant for writing tunes into a means for creating one longer work. Hadestown not only retells the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, but also recalls the culture and dress of 1930’s America with its prohibition-era setting. In the Greek myth, the lyre-playing Orpheus is heartbroken at the death of his true love, Eurydice, and so he decides to voyage to the underworld in hopes of finding her. He charms everyone so much with his melodies that even Hades agrees to strike a deal with him. Eurydice has a chance for survival, but only on one condition: Orpheus must never turn back to look upon his loved one until they are out of the underworld.
As Megan James writes in her story for the Addison Independent, Mitchell found the inspiration to write Hadestown after she composed two lines inspired by the Orpheus myth: “Wait for me, I’m coming, in my garters and pearls/ With what melody did you barter me from the wicked underworld?” Like Bacon, who was visited in her sleep by whispers of lyrics and characters, Mitchell found the incipient threads of her opera as if by magic. “The truth is the first few songs came out of nowhere,” Mitchell insists. “I was like, what are you? And they were like, we’re a folk opera!”
Hadestown was much longer than Bacon’s Folk Opera and it was also staged. Though the relationship between movement, costumes, special effects and rhythm were not always cohesive, watching Hadestown was truly exciting. The songs became an integral part of the drama, and the story rarely broke for musical interludes but rather sustained them without pause. The score combined bluegrass, jazz, rock, and folk into an energetic explosion of harmony, discord, and darkness. Hadestown traveled to hell and dragged the audience along with it. Floating up from the darkness, Mitchell captivated viewers as Eurydice with her silky voice and luminescence. After seeing Hadestown I did not simply feel as though I had been privy to something very unique; I felt I had stumbled on a whole new genre.
An official definition of a folk opera has not yet made its way into the current pop culture dialogue. Many artists have composed rock operas– The Who’s Tommy a prime example– and there are also Hip Hoperas by R.Kelly and Beyoncé and Mos Def, who star in Carmen: A Hip Hopera. Artists are eager to appropriate the term “opera” into their works, as if the genre can accommodate whoever is brave enough to endeavor its grandeur.
According to the Oxford Dictionary of Music, Opera is “a drama set to music to be sung with instrumental accompaniment by singers usually dressed in costume.” The form is said to have originated in Florence towards the end of the 16th Century and borrowed from madrigals and church music. There is something all-encompassing about opera, and Wagner viewed the form as “an amalgam of all the arts” (“Opera” 2). Throughout the ages opera has been considered as a component of high culture and an essential to the elite.
Folk seems to spring from the opposite side of the musical spectrum. In contrast with opera, which originated in Italy during a specific era, folk has existed since the beginning of music. The definition of folk music is riddled with controversy, subjective to whichever leader of thought decided to appropriate it during a particular era. In her article for Grove Music Online, Carole Pegg notes: “‘Folk music’ as a cultural construct, used for a variety of political agendas including nationalism, communism, fascism and colonialism, is the subject of ongoing research and debate.”
Folk music often describes traditional music of a particular ethnic or regional group. Without even trying, Bacon captures the irony embedded in the controversy surrounding the definition of folk music by simply referring to it as “simplistic and repetitive melodies and rich harmonies that tell stories of folks” on her website. Even though ethnomusicologists and historians may still be arguing over the true definition of folk music, the one thing everyone agrees on is that it comes from “the people,” rather than the elite.
History has shown a connection between highbrow opera and the grassroots context of folk even though they seem like disparate forms. During the verismo movement of opera, composers attempted to reveal the harsh conditions and suffering of their protagonists. Often inspired by French realistic novels of the late 19th century, these operas wanted to tell the story of the workingman rather than the nobility. La Boheme is perhaps the most famous to emerge, and it later provided the inspiration for the Broadway musical Rent.
