Beyond the Horizon

Nicolas Flagello (1928–94), although a talented composer, conductor, and teacher, lived in the shadow of his famous younger brother, the bass Ezio Flagello, who sang at the Metropolitan Opera for twenty-seven years. The older Flagello studied both at the Manhattan School of Music and the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Italy, and he was a faculty member at the Manhattan School for many years. One of his last compositions was an operatic adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s Beyond the Horizon, which he began in 1979 and completed in 1984. The opera received its world premiere on September 15, 2024, thirty years after the composer’s death. Presented by Teatro Grattacielo, one of New York City’s many small opera companies, it had only one public performance.Beyond the Horizon was O’Neill’s first Broadway success. Running for 111 performances and winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1920, it was revived only six years later, when it was performed seventy-nine more times. Although it has been supplanted in the O’Neill canon by the Tao House plays, Beyond the Horizon remains a pivotal piece in the dramatist’s development and the history of American theater. It lends itself well to operatic format because it consists mostly of two people communicating at a time. While O’Neill would develop this Aeschylean multispeaker format in greater depth later, this structure of duets is operatic in nature.Flagello’s opus joins a small group of short operas based on longer straight plays, such as Marvin David Levy’s Mourning Becomes Electra (1967) and Peter Eötvös’s Angels in America (2004). As with those works, the shorter running time results in a reduction in character development. Flagello’s opera, which runs at approximately seventy-five minutes, contains the entire plot of O’Neill’s play, but the elements are condensed. Flagello joined with musicologist Walter Simmons to reduce the lengthy play to a libretto only eighteen pages long. Simmons has also written an extensive analysis of Flagello’s music in the book Voices in the Wilderness: Six American Neo-Romantic Composers (Scarecrow Press, 2004).Flagello was one of a handful of composers who eschewed atonality and continued to write tonal music, albeit with dissonance and considerable chromaticism. One hears in this opera clear references to Puccini and Mussorgsky, much like fellow Neo-Romantic opera composers Samuel Barber and Gian Carlo Menotti. The opera is most successful when it uses traditional operatic forms—the shimmering love duet that ends act 1, scene 1, which is a throwback to any number of nineteenth-century duets, and Ruth’s introspective aria (“I now know what I did not know before”), which is the only part of the opera that has been recorded, are two examples. James Mayo’s curse of his son, which ends act 1, is clearly influenced by Rigoletto; and, given that the libretto omits the material O’Neill wrote to end the act on a softer note, this malediction becomes the climax of the act’s finale.Flagello completed the entire score of the opera but did not orchestrate it. It was, according to Simmons, his habit, toward the end of his career, to write all the music in short score (basically the piano reduction) and then hold off on the time-consuming task of orchestration until a work was accepted for performance. The composer Anthony Sbordoni of Hunter College orchestrated this opera, as he has done for other works by Flagello. He uses a full orchestra with a lot of percussion instruments. Christian Capocaccia was the skilled conductor, who led the complex score masterfully.Beyond the Horizon was performed at La Mama’s theater complex in New York City’s East Village, not in an opera house and with no orchestra pit. The instrumentalists were set up against the back wall, and the action took place on a thrust, surrounded on three sides by the audience. A few days before the performance, the opera company sent out an email stating that, due to technical problems, there would be no projected supertitles. Luckily, they were not necessary. The performers’ diction was excellent, as was the singing. John Bellemer and John Robert Green, both of whom have significant experience singing modern opera, were spectacular as Robert and Andrew Mayo, respectively. Their timbres were similar, and they looked somewhat alike, so it was easy to imagine them as brothers. Sara Kennedy was outstanding as Ruth and her aria in the third act brought down the house. Others in the cast included Daniel Klein as James Mayo, Melina Jaharis as his wife Kate, and Carla López-Speziale as Ruth’s mother. Steven Kirby appeared as Captain Dick Scott, who, although his role is significantly abridged from O’Neill’s play, exhibited the necessary amount of jocularity that a world-traveler should possess.Robert’s and Ruth’s child, Mary in the original, always proves a problem in staging. She is supposed to be two years old, but no toddler would be able to speak the dialogue given to her. So, she is usually played by a child of around six, which creates problems, as the subjects father and daughter talk about—shoes and socks and naps—are not as believable for older children. Here, the gender of the role was switched and the character was renamed Matty. One could argue that fathers have a different sort of relationship with their sons than with daughters, but that was not as big a problem as the child who played the much-reduced role (with only a few scattered words of dialogue), Anthony Jimenez Peña, who looked as if he is between eight and ten. Given the pruning the play underwent in its transformation, all the business with the child could have taken place offstage.A few chairs sufficed for the staging of the action that took place on a thrust with virtually no scenery. Director Ian Silverman handled his role adequately when there were only a few singers to deal with but did something strange at the end, when the entire cast came onstage—with zombie-like makeup on their faces—to watch Robert’s death. This choice distracted from the tragedy of the opera’s final moments. In the absence of scenery, the costumes were of paramount importance, and here, they let the audience down. More attention should have been paid to O’Neill’s instructions, especially with regard to Andrew, who first should appear in overalls, then a ship’s officer’s uniform, then an expensive business suit. The costuming shows the progression of his status in life. Captain Scott also needed a smart uniform. The costumes, produced in partnership with the High School of Fashion Industries, fell short in these and other cases.On a musical level, it was a magnificent performance, and the sold-out crowd gave the performers a standing ovation that lasted for a long time. Nicolas Flagello was vindicated and his music came alive for new generations in this production, and Teatro Grattacielo along with its artistic director Stefanos Koroneos are to be commended for bringing this work to life. This performance concluded the opera company’s thirtieth season fittingly.