Ornithology and matrimony

A jilted bride languishes in a self-imposed prison of madness and decay. An amateur naturalist fathoms the fetters of his marriage during a lecture on the mating habits of waterfowl. This is the basis for two one-act operas by American composer Dominick Argento.

Miss Havisham's Wedding Night is based on a character from Charles Dickens's Great Expectations. Aurelia Havisham is jilted not so much at the altar but in her parlor, where she receives a note of regret during her final preparations for the ceremony. She smashes all the clocks and remains in her wedding attire (less one shoe she had yet to put on) for the next fifty years. The opera is a forty-minute virtuoso mad scene in which Aurelia replays that fateful day in her mind. Soprano Heather Buck's greatest talent was showing that Miss Havisham is aware of her madness. It was a heartbreaking display of noble indignity.

A Water Bird Talk is loosely based on Anton Chekhov's short play On the Harmful Effects of Tobacco, with slides and excerpts from John James Audubon's The Birds of America. The reluctant Lecturer cowers onstage in the shadow of his offstage wife. Each new slide of a bird elicits a tangent on his own home life, where he has a brood of seven daughters (all born on the 13th). When the Lecturer sits down at a piano to demonstrate a birdcall we see him fly free into dreams of what he once might have been. Baritone Aaron Engebreth had the right sympathetic humor to make us love and pity the hen-pecked husband.

Suffolk University's refurbished 100-seat Modern Theatre was an ideal venue for these two intimate monodramas. A dozen or so musicians filled the small pit, with a harp and keyboards in the left and right loges. Odyssey Opera's conductor Gil Rose is a champion of Argento's works, and all of the artists involved did the composer justice.