Glimmerglass Opera Book Club

Sins of the Seventh Sister: A Novel Based on a True Story of the Gothic South

2008-11-19T14:38:00.001-08:00

In October, Glimmerglass Opera created a simple online suvey to discover what audience members would like to read next for the Glimmerglass Opera Book Club.

You voted, and more than 40 percent of you preferred to read Sins of the Seventh Sister: A Novel Based on a True Story of the Gothic South by Huston Curtiss. Courtesans: Money, Sex and Fame in the Nineteenth Century by Katie Hickman and Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter by Simone de Beauvoir followed closely in second and third place. The suggested books were chosen based on their similarities to La Traviata, an opera featured in Glimmerglass Opera’s 2009 Festival Season.

We look forward to reading Sins of the Seventh Sister with you. It is proving to be a stirring recolation of the prejudice and financial crises faced during the 1930s in the South.

Let us know what you think!

What's Next for the Glimmerglass Opera Book Club?

2008-10-14T15:26:00.000-07:00

The imminent cold winter months have spurred the Glimmerglass Opera Book Club into action. Glimmerglass is ready to choose the next book, and we want your input.

The Glimmerglass Opera Book Club began November 2007. Focused on books related to the upcoming season, the club was created to inspire audience members to take a step further in their exploration of opera and its literary connections. This past year, books have been selected based on staff recommendations, but Glimmerglass would love your assistance in choosing the next book.

A simple online survey has been created to discover what Glimmerglass audience members would like to read next. The survey offers three staff recommendations and a space for your suggestion. The suggested books were chosen based on their similarities with La Traviata, an opera featured in Glimmerglass Opera’s 2009 Festival Season. The three suggested books and La Traviata explore unconventional women who challenge societal attitudes. More information on the suggested books may be found below. Help us pick the next one by clicking here: Choose the next book!

Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
by Simone de Beauvoir

A superb autobiography by one of the great literary figures of the twentieth century, Simone de Beauvoir's Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter offers an intimate picture of growing up in a bourgeois French family, rebelling as an adolescent against the conventional expectations of her class, and striking out on her own with an intellectual and existential ambition exceedingly rare in a young woman in the 1920s.
She vividly evokes her friendships, love interests, mentors, and the early days of the most important relationship of her life, with fellow student Jean-Paul Sartre, against the backdrop of a turbulent political time.

Sins of the Seventh Sister:
A Novel Based on a True Story of the Gothic South
by Huston Curtiss

How many times have you thought, “this has got to be true – no one could make this up?” Well, in 1929, Huston Curtiss was seven years old, living with his beautiful, opinionated mother (whose image is on the cover of this book), and surrounded by their romantic, fiercely independent, and often certifiably insane relatives. Huston has never before written about that time – an era of racism and repression, a time when this country was still relatively young, an age of quirky individualism and almost frontier-style freedom that largely has ceased to exist. Fearful he would not be believed, on one hand, but desirous of the freedom to embellish, on the other, Curtiss chronicles that time in Sins of the Seventh Sister, a book he characterizes as “a novel based on a true story of the gothic South.”

It is his story and the story of the people of Elkins, West Virginia, a small town whose inhabitants included his mother, Billy-Pearl Curtiss, and her many sisters – all stunning blondes. Billy-Pearl would prove to be an irresistibly romantic figure in her son’s life. She was the seventh of eleven children, all girls to her father’s consternation. By the time of her arrival, her father felt he had been patient enough and insisted on calling her Billy; he taught her everything he had intended to impart to his firstborn son. She would grow up to be one of the most beautiful women in the county, but also one of the most opinionated and liberal. Her aim was so precise that she was barred from the local turkey shoot because none of the men had a chance against her. When a Klansman accused her of attempted homicide after she shot him through the shoulder to stop him from setting fire to the home of her black neighbors, she told the sheriff, “If I had meant to kill him, he’d be dead.”

And with that defense, she was exonerated. Sins of the Seventh Sister is brilliantly conceived and masterfully written, as alive with flamboyant characters and wildly uncontained emotions as any book to come out of the South.

Courtesans: Money, Sex and Fame in the Nineteenth Century
by Katie Hickman

During the course of the nineteenth century, a small group of women rose from impoverished obscurity to positions of great power, independence, and wealth. In doing so they took control of their lives – and those of other people – and made the world do their will.
Extremely accomplished, well-educated, and unusually literate, courtesans exerted an incredible influence as leaders of society. They were not received at court, but inhabited their own parallel world – the demimonde – complete with its own hierarchies, etiquette, and protocol. They were queens of fashion, linguists, musicians, accomplished at political intrigue, and, of course, possessors of great erotic gifts. Even to be seen in public with one of the great courtesans was a much-envied achievement.

Help us pick the next book by clicking here: Choose the next book!

Barry Day’s This Wooden O: Shakespeare's Globe Reborn: Achieving an American's Dream

2008-05-21T08:58:00.000-07:00

Glimmerglass Opera’s Online Book Club moves forward with Barry Day’s This Wooden O: Shakespeare's Globe Reborn: Achieving an American's Dream. The book ties closely with Glimmerglass Opera’s summer season, in that Glimmerglass is realizing the saga of rebuilding its own Globe Theatre – albeit on a much smaller scale.

This Wooden O delves into the research, planning and implementation of today’s Globe Theatre, which stands in London’s Bankside. More specifically, it focuses on the efforts of American actor Sam Wanamaker to make the new Globe a reality. Author Barry Day guides readers on the emotional journey taken by Wanamaker and his supporters – a journey fraught with trials and tribulations, beginning in 1949 and concluding in 1997. While the book documents the legal processes and red tape Wanamaker and those who shared his dream encountered over the years, it is also chock-full of historical tidbits (At what angle should the theater be arranged to most effectively utilize sunlight in the open theater? What geometric model was used by medieval builders?). The book chronicles fascinating construction details as well as the political drama that went into building a historically-accurate representation of Shakespeare’s Globe.

The set that is currently being built in Cooperstown, New York, for Glimmerglass Opera’s 2008 Festival Season will not be an exact replica of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre – simply an evocation. But understanding the history behind Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre will undoubtedly make the 2008 Shakespeare-inspired season that much more interesting. This Wooden O gives remarkable insight into the re-creation of the Globe Theatre as well as the passion of an actor who wanted an international audience to experience Shakespeare’s world…thatched roof and all.

Finding the Jewish Shakespeare: The Life and Legacy of Jacob Gordin by Beth Kaplan

2008-04-15T11:05:00.000-07:00

Finding the Jewish Shakespeare: The Life and Legacy of Jacob Gordin is the newest Glimmerglass Opera Book Club selection. It's an engrossing character study of Jacob Gordin, the most prolific playwright of the Yiddish stage at the turn of the twentieth century, and his role as a most reluctant celebrity amid the great changes in Jewish life that took place with the waves of immigration to New York's Lower East Side that coincided with the golden age of Yiddish theater.

Yakov Mikhailovich Gordin, always Russian at heart and never quite at ease in America, indeed paralleled Shakespeare with his truly amazing output of plays. Gordin, like Shakespeare, was surrounded by colorful and versatile actors with whom he had a cyclical relationship consisting of competition and conflict; perhaps in response to this, he positioned himself as the protagonist in his plays (some have argued that Shakespeare used Shylock in the same manner) and in the newspaper which also served as his mouthpiece. His masterworks were Mirele Efros, The Jewish King Lear, and God, Man, and Devil, all evincing a very high need to propel his fellow Jews into social and political enlightenment, with Gordin speaking from the stage, as it were, about the value of education, the virtues of socialism, and even commenting on feminism at a time when Yiddish theater was rigidly formulaic and usually included breaks for song and dance, no matter the subject matter. His efforts to elevate his contemporaries and the art form were met with mixed reaction, and resulted in a long and bitter feud between him and Abraham Cahan, the editor of a rival newspaper, the Jewish Daily Forward.

Gordin’s imperiousness and emotional detachment from his friends (and even his family) did not help his cause, and despite his many successes, he was a poor businessman. At the time of his death, his family struggled for a proper memorial even though “Jewish New York has never witnessed such a funeral” for such a complex man. His legacy, described in this first full-scale biography, is his many works, still being performed today, just as those of William Shakespeare.

Nigel Cliff's The Shakespeare Riots: Revenge, Drama, and Death in Nineteenth-Century America

2008-01-16T06:52:00.000-08:00

“One of the bloodiest incidents in New York’s history, the so-called Astor Place riot of May 10, 1849, was ignited by a long-simmering grudge between the two leading Shakespearean actors of the age, [William Macready and Edwin Forrest]…. The Shakespeare Riots recounts the story of this momentous night, its two larger-than-life protagonists, and the myriad of political and cultural currents that fueled the violence…. Nigel Cliff weaves a spellbinding saga of soaring passions, huge egos, and venal corruption.”

–Adapted from editor’s remarks on The Shakespeare Riots

Bill Bryson's Shakespeare: the World as Stage

2007-11-09T14:08:00.000-08:00

The Glimmerglass Opera Book Club is launched with the reading of Bill Bryson’s Shakespeare: the World as Stage, a biography that celebrates Shakespeare as a writer of extraordinary talent and great inventiveness. Several books have been written posing the theory that Shakespeare was not Shakespeare, but rather Edward De Vere, Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe or others, but James Shapiro, author of A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599, said of the book, “Bryson cuts through the wild speculation and conspiracy theory surrounding Shakespeare to get at what matters most: the writer’s life.”

What do you think?