Faust and Furious

Farmville’s summer opera is equal parts genius, power and magic.

Once a year, Harlan Horton transforms his stately Colonial-style home in Farmville from just another house on the block into a Mecca for modernized classical performance: the Summer Garden Opera, where the sonatas of great composers find a niche among summer cocktails, mingling guests and Virginia flora.

Since it was first dreamed up in 2010 by Horton, who serves as the opera’s president, along with vice-president and artistic director Chris Swanson, the Summer Garden Opera has produced classics, such as Puccini’s La Boheme, Donizetti’s L’Elisir D’Amore, and Strauss’s Die Fledermaus, all to outstanding reception from the community. Enthusiasm has been so great, in fact, that for this year’s June performance of Charles Gounod’s Faust, Horton aims to keep ticket sales down. Here, we sit down with Horton as he details the program’s growth, the highlights of this summer’s production and just what it takes to transport a fine art performance into his own backyard.

This year’s Faust will be the eighth performance of the Summer Garden Opera. How has the event grown since the first year?

Certainly we’ve grown in the number of people who attend. Our first year, 2010, we probably had maybe around 100 or fewer, and last year we had about 250. We have increased our number of sponsors each year that help pay for [the event], which means that we can always improve our music. So we have more singers and this year, we’re going to have a few more orchestral pieces.

What is the expected attendance in 2017?

Last year was about 250 and that was a lot for us, so I’m trying to keep the numbers around 200 or 225.

Why bring opera to Farmville?

Well, Chris [Swanson] is a voice professor at Longwood University, and I’ve always been interested in classical music. The Hampden-Sydney College had been doing a classical music festival for many years on campus, which is just down the road from Farmville, and that festival had ended. There really wasn’t a venue or event centered around classical music in Farmville, so in having a discussion with Chris one night, we talked about opera and bringing it to the area. We felt like it would be such a unique thing to do that—here in the setting that we do it in, which is my garden. It would essentially be a place where people could experience the performing arts tradition in a non-threatening sort of way, and it would break down the barriers of access to opera.

What is the biggest challenge of putting on this event?

Space. The space for people—obviously it takes place outside, so weather is always an issue, and as the event has grown, making sure that the garden will accommodate those people in a way that they can experience the opera fully.

What are the benefits of hosting the event in a private space rather than a public one and how did this come about?

Well, obviously it’s a very unique venue, and it just worked that my house is designed with a very large room on the back with all these gigantic window-doors that open in the garden to a terrace, a bluestone terrace, and the acoustics there just seemed to work. As far as the benefit, obviously the real benefit is that it is an environment in which people can enjoy something that perhaps they might not think about attending if it were held in a traditional opera house or theater of some sort. Here, people can enjoy the opera while also having supper and cocktails.

How does the Summer Garden Opera make an impact on the arts and on the Farmville community?

I think that Farmville is becoming a destination for lots of artistic endeavors, shall we say, for performing arts and visual arts. I think that we bring something to the community that’s not here already, and that’s something people appreciate and enjoy. So I think that our impact on the community is, in a cultural sense, raising quality of life and being part of an arts community that is developing here.

What can we expect to see from the performance of Faust this year?

You can certainly expect to see a larger orchestra, and the lead role is being sung by Ben LeClair from Houston. It is a bass role, and he is, you know, seven feet tall and has an enormously fantastic bass voice … so I think that things to look for would be a larger orchestra, and the lead role sung by Ben LeClair, which will be phenomenal.


Faust will be performed on Saturday, June 17 at 6:30 p.m. Tickets are $50 and include supper and an open bar. SummerGardenOpera.com

Sarah Leonhardt
Sarah Leonhardt is a past contributor to Virginia Living.