Robert Ward / Howard Stambler (1961)
Based on the play by Arthur Miller

A Puritan community in Colonial Massachusetts gets caught up in witch-hunting hysteria.

“A lethal brew of illicit sexuality, fear of the supernatural, and political manipulation.” That’s how Arthur Miller describes his play The Crucible. That might not sound like the same Crucible you read in your high school English class, but after you remember that the Salem witch trials were an allegory for 1950s McCarthyism, you might recall the occult ritual the young girls perform with Tituba in the woods, or the steamy tension between John Proctor and his former servant Abigail. In this light, The Crucible sounds like the hottest new show on network television. Thanks to Robert Ward and Howard Stambler, The Crucible could be the hottest show on the operatic stage.

Kritzerland Records describes Ward’s score as “wonderfully tonal, filled with exquisite melodies, musical tension, and dramatic power, all with Ward’s peculiarly American sound, perfectly reflecting the passions and mounting hysteria on view… and Stambler’s libretto stays very true to Miller’s play.” Ward and Stambler certainly made some cuts to turn Miller’s full-length play into a full-length opera. Though Miller refused to serve as the opera’s librettist, he did lend a hand to the creative team. As reviewer Susan Galbraith reports, Miller read his play out loud to Ward, who then shaped his own musical lines around Miller’s delivery. Ward employs a “rich musical palette, using Protestant-like hymns, folk tunes, and even spirituals with strong dramatic musical exchanges.” The collective result of Miller’s, Stambler’s, and Ward’s contributions is a faithful adaptation with a well-balanced marriage of text and music, yielding something perhaps more akin to a musical. Kritzerland says, “With sung-through musical theater like Les Misérables and others, The Crucible would probably be at home in a Broadway theater these days alongside other classic American operas like Porgy and Bess, Street Scene, and Regina.”

Miller’s play from 1953 originally responded to Senator Joe McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee’s witch hunt for supposed Communists, targeting everyone from government employees to artists, including Paul Robeson, Marc Blitzstein, and even Miller himself. Running parallel to this Red Scare was the Lavender Scare, a witch hunt to bar alleged homosexuals from state employment out of fear they were more susceptible to Communist influence. In our contemporary moment, political “witch hunts” are back in our lexicon. According to the online Trump Twitter Archive, Donald Trump tweeted the phrase “witch hunt” 374 times between his inauguration in 2017 and his ban from Twitter four years later. Calls to “drain the swamp” and theories about a “deep state” operating behind the scenes also pervaded during his tenure. Regardless of where you fall in the political divide, life today feels like Salem in 1692: neighbor against neighbor, each caught up in his own paradigm of truth.

At a time where it’s easy to feel powerless in the face of national politics, The Crucible shows us that the truth is worth fighting for. Miller said, “On its most universal level, The Crucible is about community hysteria, fear of the unknown, the psychology of betrayal, the cast of mind that insists on absolute truth and resorts to fear and violence to assert it, and not least about the fortitude it takes to protect the innocent and resist unjust authority.” (Emphasis mine.) For John Proctor, our flawed yet beloved protagonist, that resistance leads to his own death. John sacrifices his own life instead of signing a false confession; the truth, for him, is worth dying for. But for those who aren’t so morally inclined — or at least don’t like their operas that way — here’s this evaluation from William Burnett of Opera Warhorses: “The Crucible is much more than a ‘message’ opera. In performance, it proves to be not only one of the great mid-20th century American works — undeservedly neglected — but a dramatically powerful, musically compelling, operatic experience.”

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