Murder Mystery

Lizzie Borden
by Jack Beeson
Glimmerglass Opera; Stewart Robertson, conductor.
Performers listed below.

For better or worse, there are few things that seem to capture the fancy of the American public like a good-old, red-blooded murder case. You can find murders at the movies, on the front page of the paper, leading off the evening news, and on Court TV, where they've built an entire cable channel around coverage of sensational crimes. And there's no use claming you're "above" all that. The ratings during TV's "Sweeps Weeks" tell us that just about everyone eats this stuff up.

But this is nothing new. And for evidence of that, we'll cite a double murder and resulting trial that took place more than a century ago, and still fascinate us to this day. It's the case of Lizzie Borden, the Fall River, Massachussetts, spinster who in 1892 was tried for the hatchet murders of her father and stepmother. You remember the little ditty: "Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her mother forty whacks . . ." The case sensationalized the city, and it's been Fall River's chief claim to fame ever since. The Fall River Police Department now has a Web page devoted to Lizzie-mania!

The real Lizzie Borden was acquitted of the crime and, officially, the case has never been solved. But public opinion convicted Lizzie long ago, and Beeson's opera joins right in. In this version, the bloody murders are simply the result of an unfortunate family group: Two high-strung but repressed young women, sharing a house with their filthy-rich but tightfisted and Puritanical father, and with his wife, the girls' haughty, spendthrift stepmom. Put all that together with a Lizzy who's more than a little delusional, and what you get is forty whacks times two.

You also get a riveting stage work, and we'll hear it this week on NPR WORLD OF OPERA, with host Steve Curwood. It's an All-American murder case coming to you from the All-American locale of Cooperstown, NY - home of the Baseball Hall of Fame, and of GLIMMERGLASS OPERA.

Performers:
Phyllis Pancella (Elizabeth Borden), Kelly Anderson (Andrew Borden), Sheri Greenawald (Abigail Borden), Victor Barret (Reverend Harrington), Margaret Lloyd (Margret Borden) Erin Caves (Captain MacFarlane)


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