Lyric Opera 2019-2020 Issue 7 The Light in the Piazza

FROM PAGE TO STAGE THE LIGHT IN THE PIAZZA’S 60-YEAR JOURNEY F or many, The Light in the Piazza may already be a familiar title. The original story was published nearly 60 years ago, with a movie version starring Olivia de Havilland and George Hamilton coming out just two years later. Its musical incarnation first hit the stage in 2004, proving the story’s timeless credentials. It sprang from the mind of Elizabeth Spencer, an American author from Mississippi, who wrote it as a novella, published first in The New Yorker magazine in 1960. It wasn’t just some southern belle’s imaginings of Europe – Spencer had already completed two novels, and worked as a teacher and journalist when, in 1953, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for her creative ability. She used the money to move to Italy and soak up the culture. This resulted in no less than six short stories set in places like Florence, Rome and Venice. ‘I wrote about [Italy] because I loved it and had stayed there so long that I thought I knew it well enough,’ she said in a 1986 interview. ‘But I always wrote from an outsider’s point of view. I think it must be clear that one has to do that, out of honesty.’ Many of her stories from that era centre around female American protagonists navigating through intense personal problems that can become overwhelming. ‘Margaret Johnson, the mother in The Light in the Piazza , had had a psychic break of sorts before the time of the story,’ she said in the same interview, explaining that as a writer she tests her characters to see if they can come through the challenge. As well as her short stories, Spencer also wrote nine full-length novels and won numerous awards, fellowships and honours. However, The Light in the Piazza became her best known work, a success that she sometimes struggled with. ‘It’s my albatross,’ she said. ‘I think it has great charm, and it probably is the real thing, a work written under great compulsion, while I was under the spell of Italy. But it only took me, all told, about a month to write, whereas some of my other novels – the longer ones – took years. So, to have people come up to me, as they do, and gush about The Light in the Piazza , and be totally ignorant that I ever turned a hand at anything else, is… upsetting.’ ‘I WROTE ABOUT ITALY BECAUSE I LOVED IT AND HAD STAYED SO LONG THAT I THOUGHT I KNEW IT WELL ENOUGH’ Lyric Opera House | 8