Aaron Copland didn't have the theatrical instinct of a George Gershwin or even a Gian Carlo Menotti, but that didn't keep him from writing one of the best operas we have in the "American" vein. The Tender Land was composed in 1953 on a commission from Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II--who since the premiere of Oklahoma! 10 years earlier could afford such largesse--and received its premiere on April 1, 1954 at the City Center in New York. Concerning a girl transformed into a young woman by her first experience of love, The Tender Land is set in the American Midwest during the 1930s. The libretto by Horace Everett (a pseudonym of Erik Johns) was inspired by photographs taken by Walker Evans of a rural, Depression-era mother and her daughter that had appeared in James Agee's book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. The music is cut from the same cloth as that of Appalachian Spring--the melodic, easygoing, folkish vein that Copland could manage about as easily as breathing. Lightly scored (calling for winds and brass in twos) and with spoken dialogue in the style of the musical stage, the score has come to be regarded as one of Copland's finest, as he himself believed it to be. You couldn't get a more authentic cast than the one heard here, consisting entirely of good American singers whose delivery is appropriately nonoperatic, and including Minnesota native Elisabeth Comeaux in the central role of Laurie. Philip Brunelle leads the forces of the Minnesota-based Plymouth Music Series in an idiomatic if slightly underpowered performance that comes from the Heartland and goes straight to the heart. Ted LibbeyAlthough the folk-tinged ballet scores that made Copland the quintessential American composer of the early 1940's are outside the scope of this selection, he worked along similar lines well into the 50's. ''The Tender Land,'' his 1956 opera about a girl's coming of age on a Midwest farm, is the culmination of this style, offering both the orchestral warmth and evocativeness of ''Appalachian Spring'' and the homey vocal writing of ''Old American Songs.'' Its attractions include a gorgeous quintet (''The promise of living''), an infectious barn dance (''Stomp your foot'') and a touching finale. The Brunelle recording, with Elisabeth Comeaux as Laurie and Dan Dressen as Martin, does the score full justice. Allan Kozinn
Disc: 1
1. The Tender Land: Prelude
2. The Tender Land: Act One, Scene 1: The Front Yard Of The Moss Home
3. The Tender Land: Act One, Scene 1: 'Two Little Bits Of Metal'
4. The Tender Land: Act One, Scene 1: The Arrival Of The Postman
5. The Tender Land: Act One, Scene 2: Opening The Package
6. The Tender Land: Act One, Scene 2: 'This Is Like The Dress I Never Had'
7. The Tender Land: Act One, Scene 2: Dance And Exit
8. The Tender Land: Act One, Scene 3: Laurie's Entrance: 'Once I Thought I'd Never Grow
9. The Tender Land: Act One, Scene 3: Ma's Entrance
10. The Tender Land: Act One, Scene 3: 'Remember The Boy That Used To Call'; Ma's Exit
11. The Tender Land: Act One, Scene 4: Entrance Of Martin And Top
12. The Tender Land: Act One, Scene 4: Martin And Top Enter The Farmyard
13. The Tender Land: Act One, Scene 4: Duet: 'We've Been North'
14. The Tender Land: Act One, Scene 4: Grandpa Meets The Boys
15. The Tender Land: Act One, Scene 4: Trio: 'A Stranger May Seem Strange That's True'
16. The Tender Land: Act One, Scene 4: Interlude - Martin And Top Make Horseplay
17. The Tender Land: Act One, Scene 5: The Invitation
18. The Tender Land: Act One, Scene 5: Quintet - 'The Promise Of Living'
1. The Tender Land: Prelude
2. The Tender Land: Act One, Scene 1: The Front Yard Of The Moss Home
3. The Tender Land: Act One, Scene 1: 'Two Little Bits Of Metal'
4. The Tender Land: Act One, Scene 1: The Arrival Of The Postman
5. The Tender Land: Act One, Scene 2: Opening The Package
6. The Tender Land: Act One, Scene 2: 'This Is Like The Dress I Never Had'
7. The Tender Land: Act One, Scene 2: Dance And Exit
8. The Tender Land: Act One, Scene 3: Laurie's Entrance: 'Once I Thought I'd Never Grow
9. The Tender Land: Act One, Scene 3: Ma's Entrance
10. The Tender Land: Act One, Scene 3: 'Remember The Boy That Used To Call'; Ma's Exit
11. The Tender Land: Act One, Scene 4: Entrance Of Martin And Top
12. The Tender Land: Act One, Scene 4: Martin And Top Enter The Farmyard
13. The Tender Land: Act One, Scene 4: Duet: 'We've Been North'
14. The Tender Land: Act One, Scene 4: Grandpa Meets The Boys
15. The Tender Land: Act One, Scene 4: Trio: 'A Stranger May Seem Strange That's True'
16. The Tender Land: Act One, Scene 4: Interlude - Martin And Top Make Horseplay
17. The Tender Land: Act One, Scene 5: The Invitation
18. The Tender Land: Act One, Scene 5: Quintet - 'The Promise Of Living'
CD1 Duration: 42:23
Disc: 2
1. The Tender Land: Act 2, Scene 1: The Graduation Eve Supper
2. The Tender Land: Act 2, Scene 1: The Supper Ends
3. The Tender Land: Act 2, Scene 1: Grandpa's Toast: 'Try Makin' Peace'
4. The Tender Land: Act 2, Scene 1: Laurie's reply: 'Thank You, Thank You All'
5. The Tender Land: Act 2, Scene 1: The Invitaition To Dance
6. The Tender Land: Act 2, Scene 1: The Dance: 'Stomp Your Foot Upon The Floor'
7. The Tender Land: Act 2, Scene 2: Dance Music And Dialogue
8. The Tender Land: Act 2, Scene 3: Party Music Back In The House
9. The Tender Land: Act 2, Scene 3: Top's Song: 'Oh, I Was Goin' A-Courtin'
10. The Tender Land: Act 2, Scene 3: The Dancing Resumes
11. The Tender Land: Act 2, Scene 3: Duet: 'You Dance Real Well'
12. The Tender Land: Act 2, Scene 3: 'Laurie...You Know, Laurie'
13. The Tender Land: Act 2, Scene 3: Duet: 'In Love? In Love?'
14. The Tender Land: Act 2, Scene 3: 'The Tender Land'
15. The Tender Land: Act 2, Scene 4: Grandpa's Confrontation
16. The Tender Land: Act 2, Scene 4: Party Farewell
17. The Tender Land: Act Three: Introduction
18. The Tender Land: Act Three, Scene 1: Entr'acte
19. The Tender Land: Act Three, Scene 1: Duet: 'Laurie, Laurie...'
20. The Tender Land: Act Three, Scene 1: Martin Alone: 'Daylight Will Come In Such Short TIme'
21. The Tender Land: Act Three, Scene 1: Dialogue
22. The Tender Land: Act Three, Scene 1: Top's Aria: 'That's Crazy' And Exit Of Martin And Top'
23. The Tender Land: Act Three, Scene 2: Interlude: Daybreak
24. The Tender Land: Act Three, Scene 2: 'The Sun Is Coming Up'
25. The Tender Land: Act Three, Scene 2: Laurie's Farewell
26. The Tender Land: Act Three, Scene 2: 'All Thinking's Done'
CD2 Duration: 64:12
Recorded October, 1989 at Ordway Music Theatre, St Paul, Minnesota
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THE TENDER LAND
American composers took a revitalized interest in opera during the postwar period, thanks partly to the successes of Britten and Menotti but even more so to the emergence of alternative venues to the great opera houses, such as regional companies and universities. "In the United States opera has held an uncertain and precarious position," wrote John Brodbin in an early review of Copland's only opera without spoken dialogue, The Tender Land (1954), "but is now meeting an unprecedented and revolutionary tide of awareness from composers, performers and laymen."
Copland had thought about writing an opera throughout the 1940s. He seemed to have all the makings of a successful opera composer, but he cautiously recognized the genre's many potential pitfalls, including the problem of securing a suitable libretto, the risk of investing so much time in a single project, the unpredictability of production values, and the difficulties of finding a contemporary vocal idiom that had dramatic thrust. In his own estimation, his tentativeness distinguished him from the "born" opera composer, but he nonetheless hoped to try his hand at what he described as a "very problematical form-la forme fatale."
His ambition to write an opera intensified in the early 1950s as he pursued possible collaborations with Thornton Wilder, Clifford Odets, and Arthur Miller. He also entertained the idea of adapting Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy (1925) or Frank Norris's McTeague (1899) as an opera, both tales of greed and corruption. Between 1950 and 1953, plans on a McTeague opera went as far as the drafting of a detailed scenario with librettist Arnold Sundgaard and the successful obtaining of rights from the Norris estate. But Copland eventually abandoned the idea.
Meanwhile, in early 1952, he accepted a commission from the League of Composers to write an opera for television with a $1,000 grant provided by Rodgers and Hammerstein. For this venture, he decided to compose a relatively small work, something appropriate not only to television but to the "college trade," as he put it to Victor Kraft, a work meant to further prepare him for the big opera that, as it turned out, he never wrote. Whereas before the war only a handful of schools annually mounted operas, now over a hundred did. Moreover, their repertory featured far more contemporary opera than did America's few professional houses. Much as the nation's flourishing high school music programs inspired The Second Hurricane (1937), so developments in higher education helped shape this new project; both operas, consequently, shared a somewhat didactic impetus.
For his libretto, Copland turned to his lover, the young, multitalented Erik Johns. "Since Erik Johns and I had been talking about working on a project together," explained Copland, "we decided to give it a try. I wanted a simple libretto, and it appealed to me to work with someone I knew without having to worry about changing a famous writer's work or doing damage to a preconceived play or story." He suggested something based on James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and, in particular, the accompanying photographs by Walker Evans. As Johns (using the pseudonym Horace Everett) began drafting a libretto in early 1952, Copland remained closely involved with its progress-"fussy and not decisive," complained Johns in his diary-frequently making cuts and revisions of his own. "Aaron is mildly enthusiastic," noted Johns after showing him his completed second draft in May, "which I hope means he is saving his wild excitement for the score." After Harold Clurman deemed, that same month, that the book had the makings of "a charming and delicate opera," Copland began work, completing the opera in the spring of 1954. It took only two years to write, a relatively short time, especially considering that he had McCarthy to contend with during this period.
Although they anticipated a television premiere, Copland and Johns failed to find an interested network; and so the New York City Opera launched The Tender Land at City Center on 1 April 1954. Thomas Schippers conducted, Jerome Robbins staged the work, Oliver Smith designed the sets, and John Butler choreographed the dances. The cast featured Rosemary Carlos as Laurie, John Crain as Martin, Jean Handzlik as Ma Moss, and Norman Treigle as Grandpa Moss. Because the opera was in a short two acts, the City Opera concluded the evening with a one act opera, one also composed for television, Menotti's Amahl and the Night Visitors.
In the months following the premiere, Copland and Johns revised The Tender Land as a three-act work, partly in response to adverse critical reaction and partly to make the work a full-evening show. This revamped version premiered to better reviews in Tanglewood on 2 August 1954. After Copland made a few additional revisions, Oberlin College gave the work's final version its first performance on 20 May 1955.
Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men-the opera's starting point began life in 1936 as a planned photo-essay (with Walker Evans) for Fortune magazine about tenant farmers in the Deep South. Agee and Walker spent three weeks in a small Alabama town, interviewing and photographing three very impoverished families. After Fortune turned down Agee's first draft, he expanded it into a sprawling book, published with Evans's photographs in 1941. Both men, critics now agree, brought a moving humanity to the subject of poverty in the rural South.
Copland gravitated toward the book-still an obscure and controversial publication in 1952-not only because he liked it but because he thought that in this way he might be able to use some of the music from his abandoned musical after Erskine Caldwell's Tragic Ground; both concerned poor southerners. Johns never read the Agee book but rather adapted its basic premise of "two men from an outside world 'invading' the inside world of a provincial family." He further based two characters, Ma Moss and Laurie, on Evans's photographs of a "passive and stony" mother and her daughter "not yet hardened by the grim life" (in Agee's book, the twenty-seven-year-old Annie Mae Gudger and her ten-year-old daughter, Maggie Louise). He retained the period of the 1930s but switched the locale from the South to the Midwest. He also reversed the class tensions: the two intruding men are now poor migrant workers, while the family, identified as "lower-middle-class," owns a farm. "These changes shifted the emphasis from difference of class to difference of individual personality," he wrote.
The action takes place in the spring, in the front yard of the Moss family farm. Grandpa Moss, Ma Moss, and her two daughters, Laurie and Beth, are about to celebrate both Laurie's graduation from high school and the spring harvest. As Act I opens, on the afternoon of the day before graduation, Ma Moss reflects on a mother's responsibilities and sorrows as Beth, about ten years old, daydreams, dancing. Me. Splinters, the postman, arrives with a mail-order dress for Laurie, warning Ma Moss about two drifters who have sexually assaulted some neighboring girls. Laurie, about eighteen years old, enters, contemplating the life awaiting her after graduation. She complains to her mother about Grandpa, who a few months earlier had broken up a blossoming romance between her and a local boy. Ma Moss promises that Laurie will have her own life if she obeys Grandpa until graduation. Top and Martin, two hoboes, enter, teasing Laurie and offering to help with the harvest. Top is outspoken and somewhat uncouth, Martin more sensitive. Grandpa warily hires them and Laurie invites them to her graduation party that evening. The Moss family, Martin, and Top sing of the joys of work and neighborly love, of "the promise of living."
Act II takes place later that night. Friends and neighbors have gathered at the Mosses' to celebrate Laurie's graduation. Grandpa toasts Laurie, who admits to confusion at this critical moment of her life. Country dancing follows. Convinced that Top and Martin are the wanted molesters, Ma Moss sends Splinters to get the sheriff. Top, amusing everyone with a bawdy folk song, plies Grandpa with liquor in the hopes of having his way later with Laurie. As Martin and Laurie dance together, they draw closer, sharing their dreams; Martin speaks of settling down with her, and both confess their love. Discovering Martin and Laurie kissing, a drunk Grandpa accosts Martin, ignoring Laurie's protestations of love. As Ma Moss publicly accuses the two men, Splinters returns, reporting that, in fact, the molesters had been caught earlier that afternoon. "They're guilty all the same," declares Grandpa, who insults Laurie and orders Top and Martin to leave by daybreak. The party breaks up and all drift off.
Act III takes place the following morning. Martin and Laurie meet just before dawn and agree to elope. As Laurie packs her things, Martin ponders this move. When Top hears about the elopement, he warns Martin that Grandpa Moss will quickly catch up with them; besides, what sort of life could a tramp offer Laurie? Martin regretfully hurries off with Top. When Laurie realizes that they have gone without her, she resolves to leave anyway; saying her farewells to her mother and sister, she exits. Ma Moss reconciles herself to Laurie's departure, musing on the cyclical nature of life in which ends mark beginnings. Beth dances and peers off into the horizon.
Although Johns gleaned some motifs and themes from Copland's popular films and ballets, his libretto differed most dramatically from those earlier works in the fact that Laurie leaves at the end. For close to two decades, Copland's work had emphasized communal solidarity or at least some kind of social accommodation; "The Promise of Living" itself arguably constitutes a culmination of such idealism. But the promises are not fulfilled; the love scene is interrupted before its final resolution, and Laurie, ultimately, packs her bags and goes. The irrational fears of Grandpa and Ma Moss-a mixture of xenophobia and sexual anxiety also strike a new note. Copland and Johns in part derived these ideas from personal experiences, including Johns's departure from home at an early age and Copland's ordeals with Congress. But such features more generally reflect the changing times; one finds almost identical elements in William Inge's play Picnic (1953).
Although Copland and Johns saw Picnic on Broadway in early 1953, long after the libretto's completion, the similarities are such that Copland's friends used to joke that Inge could have sued him for royalties. Set in America's heartland, both works are about a young woman who is "strange inside," who is a "puzzle" to her mother, who dreams of distant horizons, and who falls in love with an outsider who wants to settle down as much as she wants her freedom. Both climax with a drunken party at which truths-largely about hidden fears and desires-unfold, and both conclude with the outsider, falsely accused, run out of town and the young heroine leaving voluntarily. Both ultimately concern, in large part, sexual identity and individual freedom.
At the same time, Johns brought a unique dimension to their parallel stories, highlighting, more in the tradition of opera, and more in line with his own spiritual leanings, certain mythic qualities. Moreover, the opera contained a liberating message different from Picnic's. Whereas Inge's heroine, Madge Owen, follows her male lover at the play's end, Laurie goes on her own, "with a secret knowledge of who she is, her authentic self newly emerged," in the words of Daniel Mathers, who also noted, in a paper aimed at "decoding" the opera's homosexual subtext, Laurie's telling rebuke to her grandfather: "No one can stop the way I feel! No one can ever tell me I can't love." The opera's underlying theme of sexual self-acceptance even makes some contact with the nascent feminist and gay movements of the time; in retrospect, Johns realized that in this sense Laurie was more a child of the fifties than of the thirties, writing, "I can imagine she might have gone on to become a 'flower child,' a war protestor, or a worker in a civil rights campaign."
Johns and Copland decided on an operatic form in which set pieces solos, duets, and so forth-are embedded within a continuous flow. The first act presents in succession two solos for Ma Moss ("Two Little Bits of Metal" and "This Is Like the Dress I Never Had"), two solos for Laurie ("Once I Thought I'd Never Grow" and "Remember the Boy That Used to Call"), a duet for Martin and Top ("We've Been North"), a trio for Martin, Top, and Grandpa ("A Stranger May Seem Strange That's True") and a quintet for all five leads ("The Promise of Living"). The second act contains Grandpa's toast ("Hear Now Mr. Jenks"), another solo for Laurie ("Thank You, Thank You All"), a chorus ("Stomp Your Foot"), a solo for Top ("Oh, I Was Goin' A-Courtin' "), and a solo for Martin ("I'm Getting Tired of Travellin' Through") that leads into a duet for Martin and Laurie ("The Plains So Green"). The third act includes a duet for the lovers ("Daybreak Will Come"), a solo for Top ("Hoppin' the Freight"), two solos for Laurie ("The Sun Is Coming Up" and "Perhaps I Did Love!"), and a concluding solo for Ma Moss ("All Thinking's Done"). Some of these set pieces are longer and more self-contained than others, but none ends conclusively enough to induce applause (except for "Stomp Your Foot," and even here Copland apparently hoped to minimize any interruption by eliding into the next section). The fact that these set pieces are often stylistically indistinguishable from the surrounding dialogueand sometimes from one another-contributes further to the work's blocklike structure, one comparable to Copland's instrumental forms and described by Johns as "in the nature of an operatic tone poem."
Except for "Remember the Boy That Used to Call," the original two act version of The Tender Land contained all of these set pieces; indeed, the two-act and three-act versions are remarkably alike. Johns and Copland basically divided the original second act into two acts; the second act's first scene became Act II, and its second and third scenes became Act III. Among the more substantive revisions, they interpolated a confrontation between Laurie and Ma Moss in the first act and a shorter one between Laurie and Grandpa at the end of the second act (also adding, at Copland's suggestion, the McCarthy-inspired line for Grandpa, "They're guilty all the same"). In addition, they expanded and rewrote the elopement scene; whereas Martin had been the assertive one, now Laurie pleads that he take her away. "This immediately gives her more passion and at the same time makes his decision to leave alone more clear," explained Johns to Copland. "This is more like the situation in The Heiress." Johns hoped by such means to "slip in a bit more urgency," and Copland duly wrote some new, rather anxious music for the scene. All of these revisions amplified and elucidated Laurie's character without disturbing the opera's basic structure and flavor.
Copland used three folk tunes in the opera: "Zion's Walls" (along with his own countermelody as developed in Old American Songs) for "The Promise of Living," "Cottage by the Sea" for "Stomp Your Foot," and "If You Want to Go A-Courting" for Top's second act solo. He had planned to use the first two in Tragic Ground (which ultimately yielded very little else to the opera); the third-whose text helps delineate Top's character, thereby furthering Ma Moss's suspicions-he arrived at only after some consideration.
The opera reveals a profoundly American profile hardly explained by its occasional references to folk melody. At early performances, this quality struck casual opera goers, accustomed to Italian and German opera, more forcibly than reviewers, who generally took it for granted. One exception was John Brodbin, who, though familiar with operas by Thomson, Blitzstein, Menotti, Moore, and Weill, thought the work's Americanism noteworthy and laudable: "When necessary, he has set the flavor and humor of colloquial speech to a music that itself might be called colloquial; he has used speech rhythms as an indigenous musical element, handling them with control and flexibility. The quality is so thoroughly American, that even when sung in translation it would be certain to retain its strong American inflexion. "
Although critics typically noted similarities to Appalachian Spring, another work set in the American heartland (Johns had Kansas in mind), The Tender Land has its own distinctive ambience, like the calm of a sunbaked cornfield; Michael Fleming described it as comprising "the essential musical speech of Middle America; plain, hard, wary of exaggeration or excess." Naturally this distinguished the work from much European opera, known precisely for a certain theatrical extravagance. But Copland made some concessions to such traditions, most obviously in the occasional fermatas on high notes for the singers, but more generally in the work's "sustained lyrical writing," thought by Mathers to be "unprecedented in Copland's oeuvre."
The score also features, for all its understatement, some musical highlights, including the tender second-act love music, the exhilarating "Stomp Your Foot," and the moving "The Promise of Living"-the three episodes Copland selected for his three-movement Tender Land Suite for orchestra (1958). One might add to these Laurie's poignant "Once I Thought I'd Never Grow" (which has enjoyed a life of its own as "Laurie's Song"), Top's compelling "Hoppin' the Freight," Laurie's grand "The Sun Is Coming Up," and Ma Moss's Mahleresque "All Thinking's Done," a transcendent finale that incorporates the score's opening much as its text equates ends and beginnings. The work's often unrelieved wistfulness wants, perhaps, for greater variety and liveliness, but the score has, for all that, enormous eloquence and beauty.
Copland recorded the suite with the Boston Symphony (1960), as well as operatic highlights, shortened from the opera's full length of one hour and forty minutes to about an hour's worth of music, with the New York Philharmonic (1966); the former earned him his only Grammy Award. A complete recording of the opera had to wait until 1990, when conductor Philip Brunelle issued one with soloists, chorus, and orchestra of the Plymouth Music Series of Minnesota.
From the start, critical opinion about the work tended to focus on the book. Reviewing the premiere, Olin Downes roundly condemned it as so unconvincing as to make it impossible for Copland to bring the characters to life. Ronald Eyer similarly thought that the dramatically weak story failed to provide "a satisfactory catharsis." On the other hand, John Brodbin thought it "convincing theater," and Israel Citkowitz, taking direct issue with Downes, wrote, "The much-criticized libretto, in spite of some structural weakness and a somewhat facile language, is serviceable enough, and provides a cohesive framework for Copland's music." William Flanagan similarly thought that whatever its strengths and weaknesses, the libretto "falls into its properly subordinate place and the music moves in-a phenomenon that has occurred with many works in the standard operatic repertory. And this music is almost without question the finest composed for an American opera. "
Meanwhile, Virgil Thomson, who saw one of the early performances, and Wilfrid Mellers, who attended the European premiere (1962) given by the Cambridge University Opera Group, took a different tack, arguing that the libretto was perfectly fine but that the music's lack of the kind of "continuing dynamicism" (Thomson) and "expansive vocal lyricism" (Mellers) necessitated by opera made this one of Copland's least successful and representative scores. Even so, Thomson concluded that "the Copland catalog has good stuff under every heading, including that of opera," and Mellers was at least willing to give the work the benefit of the doubt, writing, "Adequate performance might, indeed, reveal that the opera's high-lyrical moments are its high-successes, as Copland intended them to be."
More recent productions have not clarified the work's stature. "The music misses out on one of the key elements, the sheer attraction between this sheltered girl ready to be carried off and the opportunistic young man whose arousal briefly persuades him to feel, or seem, sincere," wrote Will Crutchfield reviewing a production by the Long Wharf Theater that featured conductor Murry Sidlin's own reduced orchestration for thirteen players. And yet, continued Crutchfield, the opera succeeded in "other of its aims," so much so that, in his opinion, it clearly merited revival. Asking, "What exactly is the problem with The Tender Land," in his review of a performance by the Bronx Opera Company (1995), Alex Ross cited its inability to capture the story's "darker side," as when Grandpa Insults Laurie in the second act. "Still," Ross admitted, "that golden-hued melancholy makes a strong impact by the end of the opera." Such ambivalence typified most critical response to the work.
At the least, The Tender Land is a fragile work, aside from the Act I finale, which is seemingly indestructible. The work requires clear singing and natural, understated acting; the least affectation can jeopardize an entire scene. Only with a really fine cast, sensitive direction, and the proper venue (including perhaps television, for which the work was originally intended) can a more assured evaluation of the work be possible. For all this, The Tender Land has established itself as one of only a few American operas in the repertory; the early 1990s alone witnessed over fifteen separate productions, mostly among music schools and regional companies.
The Tender Land Suite-a viable work in its own right and one that should be much better known-was staged for the Oakland Ballet in 1978 by Eugene Loring, the original choreographer of Billy the Kid. Loring used the opera's scenario as his basic framework; the ballet seemed to work despite the fact that the music only occasionally matched the appropriate dramatic situation.
In the years following The Tender Land, Copland's interest in opera continued undiminished. He appreciated the high workmanship of Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream, the accessibility of Douglas Moore's Wings of the Dove, and the daring of Hugo Weisgall's Six Characters in Search of an Author. And he regretted the conventionality of the opera scene at home, wishing he could see such works as Schoenberg's Moses und Aron, Henze's Elegy for Young Lovers, and Nono's Intolleranza. For a number of years, he hoped to compose another piece for the lyric stage but could not find a libretto that suited him. "I admit that if I have one regret," he stated in his memoirs, "it is that I never did write a 'grand opera.' "
ABOVE PASSAGE FROM AARON COPLAND: THE LIFE AND WORK OF AN UNCOMMON MAN BY HOWARD POLLACK.
scoredaddy,
I'm alive -- and your Copland site makes me actually savor that state.
Thank you again and again.
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Thanks a lot for that!
Dear Scoredaddy :))
By the time I was able to download all of these I felt what Frank Sinatra must have felt when he was running for his dear life trying the to catch the last wagon. I felt luckier though, I got them all before they may have suddenly joined thousands of good music pieces which become dead links later on.
Many many thanks. What a great sharer you are. Keep up the gratifying sharing..!
I'm a lurker on avax, followed you here to say thanks for "The Tender Land"
Phil.
thanks to all of you for your kind comments
Hi!
Thanks again for these wonderful posts.
Regards
Hi!
I am tagging cd two and found that track 19 is missing. Do you know what`s happened.
thank you
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