Summer festival The Sembrich keeps its operatic namesake alive through composer Richard Wargo.
During the small hours of the night at Lake George’s Bolton Landing, one can hear the soothing hubbub of crickets and frogs, yet also wafting through the air from time to time is the sound of a grand piano. That would be opera composer Richard Wargo toiling away at his latest commissions in a studio that once belonged to the famous opera diva Marcella Sembrich.
Since 1937, the legacy of the great soprano who sang on opening night of the Metropolitan Opera has been under the watchful care of The Sembrich (formerly the Marcella Sembrich Opera Museum). Since 1990, the institution’s artistic director has been Wargo. Though he’s never had a formal job description at The Sembrich, Wargo’s chief duty is bringing the place alive with music and activity. He does so by planning and supervising the summer festival that takes place in the museum and on its 4 1⁄2 acres of wooded land. With the theme Nature & Music, this year’s lineup features 20 events, including recitals, talks, poetry readings and films. It runs through Aug. 30. (See the full schedule at: thesembrich.org.)
Besides being the resident impresario, Wargo also gets to set up shop for a few months in the studio where Sembrich gave voice lessons during her later
years. Adding to the atmosphere of excellence, the room is adorned with memorabilia like letters from Mark Twain and handwritten tributes to Sembrich from Verdi, Brahms and Liszt.
“The nature here is spectacular, but the opera tradition trumps it. Mahler’s signature hanging on the wall in Lake George? That inspires me,” Wargo said. “Since the onset of World War I, artists like Sembrich found refuge here and it was a refuge for me, the quiet. It’s more active now but a lot of that is my doing.”
The Sembrich’s schedule of events has grown considerably during the last decade or so and Wargo also keeps busy with tours and working with the other staff members. So it’s understandable that he burns the midnight oil in the summertime. But even during the balance of the year when his day job is composing, he does it at night.
He’s under a looming deadline for a set of choral pieces. Also on his desk is “Sharon’s
Grave,” which will be his most ambitious opera to date: “Rigoletto scale,” he calls it. Scenes from the opera were presented by artists from the Seagle Colony a few years ago.
Wargo has lived most of his life in his hometown of Scranton, where he maintains a studio in a high-rise building. (“Notes from the 9th Floor” is the name of his year-round newsletter for The Sembrich.) Besides his college years at Eastman in Rochester, his only extended periods away, apart from summers on the lake, have been to take up residencies, often a year or more in duration, at American opera companies when they’re preparing his new pieces.
The Minnesota Opera, Florida Grand Opera and Skylight Music Theatre in Milwaukee have all commissioned and debuted new works. The latter premiered his most recent opera, “Ballymore,” to a play by Irish playwright Brian Friel, and also filmed it for PBS. Wargo’s most popular work is the comic one-act “The Music Shop,” a part of his Chekhov Trilogy with a riotous score that sends up a profusion of famous classical tunes. It’s received hundreds of performances, including from Glimmerglass and Opera Saratoga (back when it was Lake George Opera). Opera News once described Wargo as “a born opera composer.”
It was in fifth grade when he first awakened to “the potential of music and theater together,” as he puts it. The show was “Oliver!” and his older sister was in the high school production that so enchanted him. Soon the family took in a holiday performance of “Amahl and the Night Visitors,” Gian Carlo Menotti’s tale of a shepherd boy’s encounter with the three wise men. “I was enthralled by the piece and still am,” Wargo said.
With the boy’s creativity ready to take form, the piano back home offered new possibilities. “The piano made all the difference,” the composer said. “If not for that I wouldn’t have been so tempted to tell stories with music. Otherwise I might have been a playwright.”
In high school, Wargo played horn and during orchestra rehearsals he observed the best ways to deploy instruments, which is otherwise known as orchestration. Junior year culminated in a performance of his composition for solo horn and orchestra (he was not the soloist).
During the summer that followed, Wargo made his first visit to the Berkshires, that summer idyll for music and theater lovers. Initially, he was leery about the rustic accommodations at
SEMBRICH 8 ▶