Saturday Afternoon at the Opera is pleased to welcome Rebecca Hass back as guest host for this week's presentation of Mary's Wedding composed by Andrew MacDonald. The opera was recorded in November 2011, a production of Pacific Opera Victoria.
Mary's Wedding is a truly Canadian story set just after the First World War.
Mary wouldn’t be the first blushing bride to wistfully reminisce about a first love on the eve of her wedding day. She indulges in one last deep embrace of the memory of Charlie Edwards, a “dirty farm boy” as her mother calls him, the night before her marriage to another man. Charlie – a young, naïve prairie boy caught up in the reality of the Great War – fills her heart and their romance is the centre of this poignant musical narrative.
Mary’s Wedding by Stephen Massicotte remains one of Canada’s most popular plays. Pacific Opera Victoria commissioned him and composer MacDonald to develop the stage presentation into an opera. They created a world where reality and dream merge, where young lovers meet and part and continue to express their love through correspondence.
As Charlie says onstage in his prologue “Tonight is just a dream. I ask you to remember that. It begins at the end and ends at the beginning. There are sad parts. Don’t let that stop you from dreaming it too.”
Cast:
Betty Waynne Allison: Mary
Thomas Macleay: Charlie
Alain Coulombe: Sergeant Flowerdew
Synopsis, courtesy of Pacific Opera Victoria:
The setting is Saskatchewan, two years after the end of World War I. On the night before her wedding, Mary Chalmers dreams of her first love, Charlie Edwards.
She dreams of their first meeting as they take shelter from a prairie thunderstorm and Charlie gives her a ride home on his horse. Their shy love grows.
When war is declared, Charlie joins C squadron of Lord Strathcona's Horse Regiment and sails for England. In his letters, he tells Mary of meeting the King of England, of volunteering to go over to France after the second battle of Ypres, in which the Germans first used chlorine gas as a weapon. He tells of his sympathetic sergeant, Gordon Muriel Flowerdew (Flowers) and recounts his life as a soldier – the trenches, the lice, the mud, the thunder of artillery, and the terrible battle of Moreuil Wood in which Flowerdew, now a lieutenant, leads his squadron against the German machine guns.
The fictional lives of the young lovers in the opera are intertwined with historical events and with the real-life character of Lieutenant Gordon Flowerdew, an Englishman who had emigrated to Canada and settled in Walhachin, B.C. Flowerdew returned to Europe to serve in the Great War with Lord Strathcona's Horse Regiment. In the 1918 battle of Moreuil Wood, Flowerdew carried out one of the last great cavalry assaults in history, leading a squadron of Lord Strathcona's Horses, armed with sabres, against German rifles and machine guns. The Canadians helped to stop the German offensive, but at enormous cost. Flowerdew himself died from his wounds and was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross.
You can hear Pacific Opera’s presentation of Mary’s Wedding on Saturday Afternoon at the Opera on June 16 at 1 p.m. (2 AT, 2:30 NT).
Related:
The world of Mary’s Wedding – Artifacts at UVic