Elmer Gantry
a new American opera
narrative description
Elmer Gantry as an opera
The evening that Bob Aldridge brought me the idea of writing an opera based on Elmer
Gantry, neither of us had any inkling of what we were getting ourselves into. We, like
everyone else, knew of Elmer as an archetype – the womanizing, hypocritical religious
figure who attains great heights before being exposed and disgraced. Every year, the
newspapers are full of stories about the latest real-life Elmer. On that first evening, we
watched the movie of Elmer Gantry together and we thought we had something
straightforward on our hands: the entertaining story of a memorable, outsized character
set in an intriguing milieu. We felt sure it could be the basis of a good, conventional
opera. We had no idea of how deeply the story would come to resonate with our personal
biographies.
Both Bob and I come from devout backgrounds, albeit very different ones. His dad is a
retired minister from North Carolina; mine is a Holocaust survivor who had an orthodox
Jewish upbringing in Czechoslovakia. Bob grew up playing guitar in church services; I
spent a year after high school on a religious kibbutz in Israel, praying three times a day.
We began our project blithely enough, but as we raced back to Sinclair Lewis’ great
novel and began absorbing it in all its sweep and caustic humor and glorious detail, the
challenge began to seem much more complex. For it became clear that Lewis had written
the great American novel about religion in our country. Religion, nothing less -- that
hugely influential, deeply personal aspect of life that has such enduring power to both
unite and divide human beings, and which is found in so many guises, put to so many
purposes (good and bad) and overall, lived with such intensity by Americans. Written in
1927, the book looks back to the turn of the 20th century, to the period in which modern
evangelism moved from the frontier to the city by adopting the strategies of that other
unst