THE REEF

synopsis

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Edith Wharton often wrote about unrequited love among the aristocracy and how love is easily smothered by the strict conventions of society. Her novel, The Reef, is a classic example. Wharton set her novel on a country estate in France, circa 1911; however, in the opera the setting is moved to a wealthy sugar plantation on the French-speaking island of Martinique in 1928 where social conventions among the planters rivaled those of France and where the island's isolation, heat and light increase the intensity of suffocation to dizzying heights. Anna Leath, an American woman, trapped with her French mother-in-law on the plantation of her deceased husband, falls in love with an American foreign service officer whom she once knew in New York, but who unbeknownst to her, has had a brief affair with the young mixed-race island girl hired as the nursemaid for Anna's daughter. To add to the mix, Anna's infirmed stepson is in love with the nursemaid, who in turn cares more for the diplomat, so the complications of the affairs of the heart increase exponentially as their relationships are slowly revealed. Issues of race and class are paramount in the attempts to resolve this “menage à quatre.” In the end when escape from the island seems within reach, Anna is forced to choose between passion and conscience, molded by society’s rigid and unforgiving hand.

Production HistorY

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• Berkshire Opera Festival
  • Workshop Performance (Act I), Merkin Hall, NYC (2024)
    • Conductor: Geoffrey Larson
    • Pianist: Curtis Serafin
    • Dialect Coach: Lynn Baker
    • Cast:
      • Nicoletta Berry, Chantal Freeman, Erik Grendahl, Tesia Kwarteng, Ryan Bryce Johnson, Elliot Paige, Markel Reed, Erin Reppenhagen, Amanda Simms, Blanche Wazelle
•  
• Finalist, 2018 Domenic J. Pellicciotti Opera Composition Prize
• (Crane School Of Music, 2016)

• Center for Contemporary Opera (NYC):

• Prima le Parole (staged reading)
  • Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant (2014)
• Libretto Slam! (2010)

Press coverage

(Berkshire Opera Festival Workshop Performance)

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1. New York Times profile of Anthony Davis and The Reef
2. by Seth Colter, April 16, 2024
3. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/16/arts/music/anthony-davis-edith-wharton-the-reef.html?
4.  
5. Review: Berkshire Eagle
6. by Evan Berkowitz, April 14, 2024
7. https://www.berkshireeagle.com/arts_and_culture/berkshirelandscapes/opera-review-berkshire-opera-festival-opera-the-reef-edith-wharton/article_6ff641e2-fac6-11ee-9d45-bbb9b22a300b.html
8. (Subscription only access)
9.  
10. Quotes:
11. "Our first glimpse of a brand new opera blew in like a storm…
12.  
13. In softer moments of Berkshire Opera Festival’s workshop performance of Act 1 of “The Reef,” its music curled fragrantly like flowers in the tropical breeze of its reimagined Caribbean setting. In harsher moments, sharp interjections crashed upon us like waves on the shore…
14.  
15. Its score, by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Anthony Davis, moved constantly. It undulated between percussively clinging to vocals…and suggestive, impressionistic phrases that added to the narrative by transporting us in time and place…
16.  
17. Its libretto, loosely adapted from Edith Wharton’s novel by Joan Ross Sorkin,was poetic and deliberate in its rich imagery and strong sense of motif. Some lyrics — like the pregnant theme of moonlight or a bigot’s drunken confession hat she has “even dreamt of the dark Amazon” — were cuttingly raw. Refreshingly free-form, it nonetheless found moments of meter and rhyme in the opera’s colliding romances — some in the tender words of the lovers themselves, others in the echo of a Greek chorus called The Invisibles…
18.  
19. The Invisibles…were the core stroke of genius to this work-in-progress. They represent the workers on this French colonial sugarcane plantation, embodying nature, satirizing moments of aristocratic absurdity and laying bare sober realities of racial inequality by taking up a word or phrase and expanding it or turning it on its head…
20.  
21. Characters slow time to reveal their inner fears and desires, and there is delicious dissonance between these truths and the idle conversation bubbling above the surface. The Invisibles musically mimic this, often holding a higher note while the lower singers push forward."
22.  
23. Review: TheatreScene.net
24. By Victor Gluck, April 13, 2024
25. http://www.theaterscene.net/music/opera/the-reef/victor-gluck/
26.  
27. Quotes:
28. "Like much of Davis’ music, what was heard played by principal coach Curtis Serafin on solo piano, was both classical western music and jazz riffs. Discernable influences at this early stage in the opera’s gestation suggest Chopin, William Grant Still and Samuel Barber. For this story which Sorkin has reset in Martinique, 1928, Davis has also used Afro Cuban rhythms to suggest the Caribbean island with its French culture…
29.  
30. Sorkin’s libretto skillfully streamlines Wharton’s story to leave out the Dover and Paris prologue and later French setting and resets the entire opera at the Martinique plantation of Madame de Chantal, Anna’s mother-in-law, which makes the story more dramatically coherent…
31.  
32. Her libretto for The Reef not only shows her dramatic skill in condensing the Wharton novel but also adds poetic passages for the Caribbean scenery not in the novel. This first hearing of Act I of the new opera bodes well for its future, offering full-bodied music and arias in its score."