New Chapter for ‘The Scarlet Letter’--as Opera : Music: Premiere of Hawthorne’s ‘heart song’ at CSULB will use a blend of professional and student singers and crew.

“The Scarlet Letter” as opera?

To composer Martin Herman, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 novel is a natural.

“Hawthorne’s language is strong,” he said. “It has meter and sings in a way that suggests that it should be set to music. Hawthorne said himself in the opening passages of the book that this was his ‘heart song’ to his wife. The nice thing about opera is that it makes passions really big.”

Additionally, in terms of the issues it addresses, “The book is every bit as contemporary now as it was then,” Herman said last week during a rehearsal break at Cal State Long Beach, where his operatic version of “The Scarlet Letter” gets its world premiere tonight.

Citing parallels in Hawthorne’s novel to contemporary American issues, Herman said he has long believed that the 1850 novel would translate well into a great American opera.

“There are issues in the novel that we face every day--issues of single parenthood, civil rights, feminism, and what constitutes a family,” said Herman, 37, an associate professor of music since 1989 at Cal State Long Beach, where he teaches music composition and theory.

He’s not the first to think the story could have a life outside of a library. In 1896, composer Walter Damrosch wrote a little-known opera based on the book. In New York, the Classic Stage Company is presenting its theatrical treatment. A movie version starring Demi Moore also is in the works.

It wasn’t until a dinner conversation in 1982 with a colleague from Hamilton College in New York, where Herman was teaching music theory at the time, that the idea of composing his own opera took hold.

The colleague mentioned that his father, novelist Tom Curley, always wanted to write a libretto for “The Scarlet Letter.” That led to a meeting between Herman and Curley.

More than 12 years, one workshop and 20 versions of the libretto later (many versions were hammered out via fax across two continents while Curley, author of “Past Eve and Adam’s” and “Knowwhere Man,” was in Italy), Herman’s “The Scarlet Letter” will at last be born.

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A joint production of CSULB music and theater departments and the campus’s new Carpenter Performing Arts Center, the opera will use a blend of professional and student singers and crew.

Among the professionals in central roles is tenor Greg Fedderly--he’ll be the Rev. Dimmesdale--who sang the title role in Britten’s “Albert Herring” for Los Angeles Music Center Opera as well as others for that company. Brent McMunn, Music Center Opera’s principal pianist, will conduct.

The university’s theater department did the staging, scenery and costumes, while students from the music department are singing in the chorus.

The opera, set in 17th-Century Puritan Boston, examines the roles of love, shame and independence as it tells the story of Hester Prynne, a married woman convicted of adultery who is forced to wear a scarlet “A” after refusing to identify the father of her child.

Herman realizes that the production is a gamble. He had never composed an opera, Curley had never written a libretto and the director, Philip Littell, had never directed an opera.

“The riskiness is part of the attraction,” said Herman, who nevertheless has a wide range of experience to draw upon.

He has written numerous chamber and symphonic pieces for the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra in Santa Cruz, N.M., and the National Orchestra Assn. in New York City. He has been guest conductor at the “Music Now--Prague” festival in the Czech Republic. His “The Fractal Bow,” a symphonic work based on mathematical algorithms and the chaos theory in physics, premiered at the Long Beach Symphony in April.

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You’d think a guy who wrote a symphony inspired by chaos theory wouldn’t have much trouble with a novel that’s nearly 150 years old. But Herman said it presented a significant challenge because of its lack of action.

“A lot of the drama is internal, so it is up to the music to get that across on stage. . . . It is like Wagner in my mind because a lot of Wagner is simply sung. This opera is like that.”

Added Littell: “It moves forward in waves like Wagner, but it has the lyric qualities of a Verdi opera. . . . It is a very emotional, dramatic score.”

Littell, 44, who lives in Hollywood and who has acted, directed and written for theater, hopes the work will enter the standard repertory.

“Since it is a self-generated project, it does have further to leap,” he said. “But that’s my job--to help it leap, and I think it has the qualities to do that, emotionally, intellectually and artistically . . . and I’m a snob about these things. I don’t get associated with mediocre projects.”

Littell’s main experience with opera has been as the author of the librettos for two works composed by Conrad Susa: “Dangerous Liaisons,” which opened in September in a San Francisco Opera production that later was broadcast over public television, and a Christmas opera, “The Wise Woman,” which premiered in Dallas at the American Guild of Organists Convention earlier this year.

“I have had two incredible opportunities (with Susa) to write and now get the opportunity to participate,” Littell said. “So if nothing else, I am getting a hell of an education: learning to develop a technique for working with opera singers on the spot, trying to make a class ‘A’ production with almost no budget and no resources. . . . I don’t know the exact figure of the budget, but it’s low. Real low. And really I don’t want to know.”

Curley, 69, also is getting an education, he said in a phone interview from his home in Manhattan, where he teaches English at St. Xavier High School. What he especially enjoys about adapting the work of another writer is that “being a novelist, it’s great not having to invent everything yourself for a change.”

He said he tried to follow the structure of the book while preserving the integrity of the prose--but without the trappings of Hawthorne’s language. “I cut down on the floweriness of it,” he said.

And he came up with an innovation. “We start the opera after the book ends,” he said, when Hester comes back to visit after her daughter is grown and in Europe. “It makes a unity. It is not quite a flashback, but the whole thing looks back on the action, and that emphasizes Hester’s strength.”

All that aside, Curley said he’ll be looking for one thing when he flies in to attend Saturday’s performance.

“I could never understand the words to opera,” he said. “I am hoping that I will be able to understand my own.”

* “The Scarlet Letter,” produced by the CSULB music and theater departments and the Carpenter Performing Arts Center, premieres tonight at the Carpenter center, Cal State Long Beach, 6200 Atherton St., Long Beach. 8 p.m. Continues with performances Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. $18 to $25. Lectures by composer Martin Herman and director Philip Littell will be given an hour before each performance in the Gerald R. Daniel Recital Hall adjacent to the center. (310) 985-7000.