Similarly, in the 1930’s Berlin’s Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht adapted The Beggar’s Opera into their ThreePenny Opera, which tells the tale of beggars in London and features the tune “Mack the Knife.” ThreePenny Opera incorporated not only the perspectives of the lower classes but also the music popular at the time; dance bands and cabarets provided much of the musical inspiration. Because of the dialogue between songs, ThreePenny could be considered a musical more than a proper opera. “But there’s something about it that is more raw, more random and gritty than most Broadway-style shows,” says Mitchell. Weill and Brecht’s work proved wildly popular in Europe and beyond, and Mitchell cites ThreePenny Opera as one of her main sources for Hadestown.
Folk and opera are not as historically polemical as they first appeared, especially in the United States. In fact, the first critically acclaimed American opera of any sort is deeply rooted in folk. Around the same time as The ThreePenny Opera, Americans saw a revival of folk music and heritage. George Gershwin caught on to the folk fervor and composed Porgy and Bess, which revolves around the lives and music of African Americans in Charleston, South Carolina and is based off of DuBose Heyward’s play Porgy. Gershwin not only incorporated the spirituals hymns of the black culture in Charleston, he went as far as to label his opera “An American Folk Opera,” a subtitle that has for some reason been dropped by popular culture over the decades.
Gershwin’s attempt to deliver music straight from the people did not succeed entirely, even if the opera was a massive success. Though he took his inspiration from spirituals and African American folk music, Gershwin composed his own “folk” songs. As Professor Ray Allen notes in an article on the folkness inherent in Porgy and Bess for the Journal of American Folklore, critics accused Gershwin of interpreting and exoticizing African American culture for the benefit of the white audience. Despite these shortcomings, Gershwin’s composition can be seen as a notable bridge between classical and folk traditions. Gershwin believed that folk music was “the strongest source of musical fecundity.” Notes Allen, in 1933 Gershwin even gushed: “The best music being written today is the music which comes from folk-sources.” When seen in the context of Gershwin’s work, the idea of folk opera depended on the appropriation of music that had naturally emerged from regular people struggling to survive.
Bacon and Mitchell’s operas capitalize on a similar eagerness for the music that emerges from “folk sources.” Both folk operas employ string instruments that are accessible to common people, such as guitars, banjos, ukuleles, and fiddles. In Hadestown, some characters bang on trashcans, pots and pans, and rattle chains in order to infuse the drama with a rhythm reminiscent of ordinary sounds. All of this is a ploy to capture what it means to exist in the realm of the regular and mundane, and also to find light in the rawness of everyday survival.
Yet even as Bacon’s Folk Opera tells a particular story about particular people, her works is an attempt to transcend the limits of individual experience. She describes herself as a loyal proponent of empathy and art as an “empathic bridge.” “It’s important for me to create a space for people to connect to their own humanity and to feel things,” explains Bacon. “Just feel, doesn’t matter what they feel, just so long as they feel. And I feel like when that happens, and especially when it happens in sort of a communal setting, it makes people care about each other a little more.”
Mitchell takes the idea of myth–a story passed down that explains something about human nature– and grounds it using the culture and music of a particular era. Yet somehow, through watching Hadestown, audience members are launched back into the realm of the universal. It’s potent artistry, and not everyone can pull it off. But she seems to have both the gumption and brains to do so. “Myths are crazy rabbit holes, plumbless in their depth, with echoes of every human story,” hints Mitchell. Even though much of the costume and music of the folk opera is reminiscent of the 1920’s, Mitchell argues: “Hadestown is really meant to exist as an archetypal story, outside of time.”
Bacon and Mitchell use folk opera, then, to both highlight and escape the confines of stories rooted in particular people. Some aspects of their folk operas seem to actually go against the accepted definition of folk. “You know we tried to hold a lot of different things together at the same time with Hadestown,” admits Mitchell. “The Greek thing, the Depression thing, plus there’s this post-apocalyptic futuristic thing…but I think sometimes mixing metaphors you stumble upon something unexpectedly consistent.” For a genre that merges so many divergent traditions, a folk opera can offer a remarkably fluid experience.
Neither Mitchell nor Bacon seem to be hung up on the possible contradictions inherent in their folk operas. “To me folk music is about storytelling, and opera is about storytelling, so there’s no contradiction at all,” urges Mitchell. What’s clear is that Mitchell and Bacon have helped a whole new subgenre gain momentum, and in the end the exact idiosyncrasies of the definitions of folk and opera could be eclipsed by the real impact of their works.
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Sources:
Allen, Ray. “An American Folk Opera? Triangulating Folkness, Blackness, and Americaness In Gershwin and Heyward’s Porgy and Bess.” Journal of American Folklore. 117: 243-261. 2004.
“Opera.” The Oxford Dictionary of Music, 2nd Edition rev.. Ed Michael Kennedy. Oxford Music Online. 3 Dec 2009. http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com:80/subscriber/article/opr/t237/e7485
Pegg, Carole. “Folk Music.” Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. 3 Dec. 2009.
http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com:80/subscriber/article/grove/music/09933
