PERSPECTIVE — Carlisle Floyd was a largely unknown 28-year-old composer in 1954 when he persuaded two noted singers, soprano Phyllis Curtin and baritone Mack Harrell, to take the lead roles in the premiere a year later at Florida State University of what would become one of the most successful works in American opera — Susannah.
Floyd would go on to write 12 operas in all, including Of Mice and Men (1970) and Cold Sassy Tree (2000). But he also contributed to the world of opera as a teacher, mentor, and advocate, playing a particularly big role at the Houston Grand Opera, where he was a de facto artist-in-residence for more than three decades.
Despite his enormous accomplishments, including being named one of the four inaugural recipients of the National Endowment for the Arts’ Opera Honors in 2008, Floyd (1926-2021) remains oddly under-recognized, especially among new generations of opera lovers.
The Carlisle Floyd Centennial, an organization chaired by Floyd’s niece and former assistant, Jane Floyd Matheny, hopes to change that with this year’s worldwide celebration of the 100th anniversary of the composer’s birth. “He wasn’t going to toot his own horn, but we kind of are, whether he likes it or not,” said conductor Christopher James Ray, the centennial organization’s executive director.
The centennial festivities, which began early in 2025 and will extend into 2027, will climax June 20 with a concert at New York’s Carnegie Hall hosted by composer Jake Heggie. The event, the only one being produced by the centennial organization, will feature familiar and not-so-familiar arias and excerpts from six of Floyd’s works.
Other Floyd events include Of Mice and Men on March 13 and 15 at Houston Grand Opera and Susannah March 14-28 at Sarasota (Fla.) Opera. In addition, soprano Janai Brugger and the Charlotte (N.C.) Symphony will present a program March 27-29 that includes the aria “The Trees on the Mountain” from Susannah.
In all, more than 50 opera productions, concerts, and academic initiatives related to the Floyd centennial have been scheduled so far in the United States, and more are expected to be announced in the coming weeks as opera companies release their 2026-27 seasons.
Some Floyd events are taking place in Europe, such as a March 29 presentation of excerpts from Susannah by the Jenaer Philharmonie in Jena, Germany, but Ray acknowledged that there are not as many as the centennial organization had hoped. “We did work with [music publisher] Boosey & Hawkes in Berlin to try and create a real push, but it wasn’t as easy as we wanted it to be,” he said.
Floyd, a native of Latta, S.C., originally pursued piano, including studies with the Czech-born virtuoso Rudolf Firkusny at the Aspen Music Festival in 1952. But the success of the 1956 New York debut of Susannah snatched him away from the keyboard and set him on a six-decade career in opera, creating both the music and librettos for all his pieces.
“My gift, such as it is, is really for writing music for the theater,” Floyd said in a 2008 Denver Post interview. “I spent a great deal of my time during my college career in creative writing, so the idea of writing my own libretti seemed no stretch at all for me.
“I think it was a matter of combining words and music with drama in the theater. I’ve done other works not for the musical theater, but my interest has continued to lie there.”
With a score flavored with folk-like tunes, church hymns, and square-dance music, the adaptation of the biblical story of Susannah and the elders set in 1950s Appalachia has gone on to influence many subsequent operas, including Libby Larsen’s Eric Hermannson’s Soul (1998), Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking (2000), and Ned Rorem’s Our Town (2006).
Susannah has received more than 200 productions worldwide, including its 1999 debut at New York’s Metropolitan Opera with soprano Renée Fleming in the title role. According to research by Opera America, Susannah was the most-produced American opera among its member companies during the 2022-23 season, the most recent for which statistics are available.
“Susannah is the first work — other than Porgy and Bess, which had its own history — that really became part of the repertory and really began to be done by multiple opera companies,” said Richard Russell, general director of Sarasota Opera. “As a result, people call him the father of American opera. He had an important place in that early history of American opera.”
At the urging of Matheny, Floyd had some initial discussions beginning in 2019 about a possible centennial celebration with David Gockley, general director of the Houston Grand Opera (1972-2005) and Floyd’s best friend. But the composer, who was anything but an egoist, was reluctant to promote himself in such a way.
“He was such an old Southern gentleman,” said Patrick Summers, HGO’s artistic and music director. “No one ever took Carlisle for granted. He was afforded an enormous amount of respect, but Carlisle was not one of those people who took all the air in a room when he walked in.”
Undeterred, Matheny and Gockley pushed on with planning, and in 2023, the Carlisle Floyd Centennial was incorporated. It has an honorary committee packed with some of the biggest names in opera, including composer John Adams, conductor James Conlon, mezzo-soprano Susan Graham, and director Francesca Zambello, and many are expected to attend the June 20 celebration at Carnegie Hall.
After the Floyd anniversary festivities conclude, Ray said, the centennial organization is going to morph into the Carlisle Floyd Institute, which will continue to promote and support the composer’s legacy. It will be co-administered by Florida State University and the University of Houston, the two institutions where Floyd taught, and proceeds from the Carnegie Hall concert will serve as seed money.
That Houston Grand Opera would present two productions to mark Floyd’s centennial (a second in the 2026-27 season is expected to be announced in April) was all but a given, considering the huge role he played at the company, starting in the late 1970s and continuing until his death in 2021.
“If you look at opera history, I suppose Verdi’s association with La Scala would have precedence over Carlisle’s association with HGO, but I can’t think of another composer who had such a long relationship directly with an opera company,” Summers said.
After Gockley took over as general director of Houston Grand Opera in 1972, he programmed Susannah and Of Mice and Men and got to know Floyd, who was teaching at the University of Houston. In 1977, the two founded what is now known as the Butler Studio (formerly the HGO Studio), a widely respected, pre-professional training program.
And this month the studio will present Of Mice and Men in a reduced, more intimate version, a co-production with Des Moines Metro Opera, Florida State University, and Lyric Opera of Kansas City (Mo.). Summers regards Of Mice and Men as one of Floyd’s masterpieces. “That world of Steinbeck and Carlisle’s sensibilities just meld into one,” he said.
In all, Houston Grand Opera presented four of Floyd’s world premieres and performed two of his other operas, but his influence went much deeper. He played a role in selecting the new operas the company presented under Gockley and mentored especially the librettists whose works were to be premiered.
“He was the artistic soul of the company,” Summers said, “much, much more than any music director, much more than David was. David would say it. David relied on Carlisle for advice. Carlisle’s influence was over every single premiere, whether he was the composer or not.”
Sarasota Opera cannot claim the the same deep connection with Floyd as Houston, but it has a history with the composer as well. The company began as the Asolo Opera Guild, an organization that hosted productions by Turnau Opera, a touring company from Woodstock, N.Y. In 1971, Turnau presented Susannah with piano accompaniment in a small theater in Sarasota with Floyd in attendance and, two years later, it brought the opera back with orchestra.
In 1974, the company began presenting its own productions and staged Of Mice and Men in 2013 as one of the works in a three-part American series. Floyd participated in the final week of rehearsals and attended the opening. “He was very complimentary of our production and said it was one of the best he had seen,” Russell said.
Sarasota Opera’s upcoming presentation of Susannah celebrates not only the centennial of Floyd’s birth but also the 1,119-seat Sarasota Opera House, formerly the Edwards Theatre. The Asolo Opera Guild bought the structure in 1979 and reopened it as the Sarasota Opera House in 1984. “It made it a good year to do the piece,” Russell said of the twin anniversaries.
Ray and Matheny hope the attention around the centennial will spur more companies to produce not only Floyd’s frequently seen works but also some of the lesser-known ones. In that 2008 Denver Post interview, the composer pointed to Bilby’s Doll (1976), based on a novella set during the Salem witch trials, as his most unfairly neglected work.
It’s impossible to know, Floyd said, why some operas succeed and others like Bilby’s Doll fall into obscurity before sometimes being rediscovered.
“You send them into the world and you have absolutely no idea what’s going to happen to them,” he said. “It’s just as much a mystery to me the ones that succeed, perhaps in a way, as the ones that don’t succeed as well in finding an audience. And, of course, luck plays a great part in it, too — where it’s produced, where it’s seen, who sees it.”
