Merry Mount

At Merry Mount, which may have been America’s first counterculture community, Morton erected a Maypole—80 feet of priapic pine—and by his own account “brewed a barrel! of excellent beare” to be distributed with “other good cheare, for all commers of that day.”

The episode inspired the Nathaniel Hawthorne short story The Maypole of Merrymount; a 1930s opera written by Richard Leroy Stokes and Howard Hanson, called Merry Mount; and a 1960s Robert Lowell theater piece called Endecott and the Red Cross.

Samuel Barber’s “Vanessa,” Howard Hansen’s “Merry Mount,” Enrique Granados’ "Goyesca" and Englebert Humperdinck’s “Königskinder” are rarities but haven’t disappeared, as have the rest of the nearly two dozen Met commissions that preceded “Ghosts” had been long forgotten. 

“Merry Mount,” which had an acclaimed premiere at the Metropolitan Opera in 1934, now seems a period piece.

Such was the case with the stark shift from the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra’s offering on Wednesday evening, a concert version of Howard Hanson’s fusty 1933 opera, “Merry Mount,” to that of the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra on Thursday, an up-to-the-minute collection of works by Canadian composers.