Pudd'nhead Wilson  (1997).  Lyrics and Book.  Score by Robert Firpo-Cappiello. Adapted from Mark Twain's novel, Pudd'nhead Wilson. Twain claimed that while writing Pudd'nhead Wilson, the novel "changed itself from a farce to a tragedy while I was going along with it—a most embarrassing circumstance."  Our musical mingles elements of both high comedy and tragedy in its re-telling of this story of slavery, xenophobia and the meaning of race in America.  As one might expect from Mark Twain, his slaveholding river town of Dawson's Landing is rich in characters: Roxy, the light-skinned slave who creates the play's central conflict by switching her baby with the master's baby; her son, Tom, who grows up in a life of privilege only to abuse his mother, lose his fortune to gambling and murder the master; Luigi and Angelo, two visiting  Italian twins, joined at the hip, whose warm reception from the town soon turns chilly; and David "Pudd'nhead" Wilson, the town eccentric, a character who could have been played by Mark Twain himself, with his tousled hair, unmistakable voice and gift for aphorism. "Pudd'nhead Wilson" represents Twain's complex vision as a mature writer and its blend of comedy and tragedy perhaps results from the unresolvable (and perhaps unrepresentable) issues raised by the  institution of American slavery, the comi-tragic nature of the simultaneously  ludicrous and unspeakably horrifying terrors of enslavement. Robert Firpo- Cappiello's score combines elements of the African-American field chant, New  Orleans funeral lament, the spiritual, the ballads of Stephen Collins Foster, early  blues music, nineteenth century Italian opera and the influences of such twentieth-century American composers as Copland, Bernstein and Ellington.