Opera City, USA: Elmer Gantry Lands in Nashville

Given its reputation for wide brims, burnished boots and twang-addled ballads, Nashville doesn’t seem like the most obvious spot to premiere a new opera. But composer Robert Aldridge and librettist Herschel Garfein—who collaborated to bring Elmer Gantry, an adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’ 1927 novel, to the Nashville Opera—couldn’t be more delighted with their home stage. “It was like a dream come true when Nashville became interested,” Garfein says. Elmer Gantry recounts the story of a womanizing religious charlatan who, despite being exposed as fraudulent, continues to amass followers—it’s a parable that seems divinely timed, given 2007’s glut of shamed evangelicals. “You can say that about any time within the last hundred years,” Garfein laughs. “It always seems to be torn from the headlines. In this country, we don’t lack religious charlatans. The book was written in 1927, but it was set two decades earlier, at exactly the moment that evangelism went from being a frontier phenomenon to when it moved in and starting taking over cities, right around the turn of the century. And it did that by adopting the techniques of American business: advertising, mass-marketing, promotion. And that’s really what Elmer Gantry represents. The twining of those two strands of American life, religion and business.” For their original score, Aldridge and Garfein incorporated bits of traditional gospel and roots music, despite the obvious clash in demographics (opera’s urban, exclusive audience doesn’t seem terribly compatible with gospel’s rural, inclusive roots). “Some of the first music I ever heard was mountain gospel music and bluegrass, hymns from rural Appalachia—it really had a profound effect of me,” Aldridge says. “This was a way for me to get back in touch with that.” Aldridge (whose father is a retired minister) and Garfein (the son of a Holocaust survivor) began attending revival meetings and church services to get a better sense of how evangelism works. “We had to see for ourselves what it was about,” Garfein says. “Overall, what we found was that these preachers were enormously talented, and their messages were very, very nuanced and warm and helpful for people. We found a real regard for the way this religion is practiced and made a part of everyday lives.”