Douglas Moore's opera celebrated its fortieth year with a new recording, a reissue of the original-cast set and productions around the country   by David McKee
THE REAL BABY DOE, WHO DIED IN 1935

To rush straight out on a limb, Douglas Moore's The Ballad of Baby Doe, which had its premiere at Central City (Colorado) Opera in 1956, is not just a great American opera but the Great American Opera. Its riches-to-rags story is quintessentially American, and Moore (1893-1969), often dismissed as a kind of musical Grandpa Moses, has wrought a score whose sophistication and fascination deepen upon repeat hearings.

It's difficult to spend much time with Baby Doe without developing a near-obsessive fascination with an operatic love triangle made all the more powerful by its true-life origins. The story of Horace Tabor, who abandons his proper and parsimonious wife, Augusta, for the youthful Baby Doe, and loses his fortune by supporting the silver standard, is as taut and romantic a tale as La Traviata or Manon. To judge from its frequent revivals, American audiences respond to it instinctively. The fortieth-anniversary year (1996) saw revivals at Central City (recorded for Newport Classic), Chautauqua and the University of Minnesota. This month, the work is performed at Austin Lyric Opera, and Washington Opera unveils a new production, conducted by the Boston Pops' Keith Lockhart, featuring Elisabeth Comeaux, Richard Stilwell and Phyllis Pancella. Connecticut Opera follows in March, with Willie Anthony Waters leading a cast of Mary Dunleavy, Kimm Julian (D.C.'s William Jennings Bryan) and Sharon Graham. John Ostendorf, who produced the Central City recording, muses that Baby Doe "is such a part of us and our own history that it's hard to resist, [and] Moore's score -- well, anyone who can resist it is positively un-American and should consider expatriating."

Douglas Moore's fascination with the Baby Doe story dates back to 1935, when he read the obituary of Elizabeth "Baby" Doe Tabor, who froze to death in a shack (still preserved as a museum) beside her late husband's played-out Matchless Mine. A 1923 encounter with poet Vachel Lindsay, who urged Moore to bend his talents to indigenous subject matter, decisively shaped the composer's career. Some of its more immediate fruits were Moore's collaborations with Stephen Vincent Benet on children's operetta (The Headless Horseman) and folk opera (The Devil and Daniel Webster). Not until 1949 did Moore essay grand opera -- a pioneer saga, Giants in the Earth, that copped the Pulitizer Prize after its 1951 bow at Columbia University, where Moore chaired the music department. To solemnize the centennial of the discovery of gold in Colorado, the Central City Opera Association solicited Moore for a new opera.

Moore selected John Latouche as his librettist, the former's high level of musical craftsmanship enabling him to cope with the latter's occasional wordiness, as when the Tabors' cronies utter these improbably florid pensées: "All the charms of music./Wedded to poetry,/Borne aloft on Pegasus./Like as if the muses/Clad in classic draperies/Had've all descended. Bringing classic laurels/Crowning us with blessings/Their immortal benison."

WALTER CASSEL, CREATOR OF HORACE TABOR

The completed opera bowed in Central City on July 7, 1956. The premiere cast featured Dolores Wilson (Baby), Walter Cassel (Horace), Martha Lipton (Augusta), Beatrice Krebs (Mama McCourt) and Lawrence Davidson (Bryan). "The first cast looked like [the real] Baby Doe and Horace," recalls Frances Bible, the alternate Augusta, "and Martha -- in her makeup -- looked exactly like Augusta." Lipton agrees that Dolores Wilson was a double for Baby Doe, "tiny and very good-looking, [she] was very good in the part." Cassel's primacy as Tabor was undisputed. Conrad L. Osborne wrote, "Short of Lawrence Tibbett, it's hard to imagine a better choice. His weighty, pemmican baritone and bluff musical temperament are exactly on target."

What bowed at Central City is not the Baby Doe currently performed. Subsequent revisions included the addition of the gambling scene (one of the score's most powerful moments) and the replacement of Baby Doe's original aria at the Act II Governor's Ball, a folkish ditty entitled "Wake, snakes! Moon's a'rising," with the character-deepening "The fine ladies walk with their heads held high." Also, Moore was displeased (for reasons obscure to this day) with Wilson. Emerson Buckley, who conducted the world and New York City premieres, told a young soprano named Beverly Sills, "Get your ass in here and sing!"

BEVERLY SILLS IN NEW YORK CITY OPERA PRODUCTION

Lipton and Cassel repeated their roles for the New York City Opera premiere (April 3, 1958). When the Deutsche Grammophon recording was made, a contract glitch (Lipton was a Met artist on loan to NYCO) meant that Augusta fell to Frances Bible. She remembers the recording sessions as no picnic. Called at 9:30 a.m. (with laryngitis) to "somewhere on Broadway and Seventy-something street, we stood there, did one take, and that was it!"

Following a rumbustious prelude, the curtain rises with a bang: a gunshot disrupting a gala that opens the new Leadville Opera House. Horace soon enters and celebrates his exploits in a four-verse ballad, which evolves into full-blown song-and-dance. Tabor's "home" meter is 2/4, which lends impetuosity to his music, creating the impression of mouth running far in advance of brain. To an excruciatingly dissonant interval, a minor second, Augusta enters and rebukes Tabor, wrenching the key from E-flat major to C minor:

The minor second will recur when Augusta mistakes Tabor's billet-doux to Baby Doe for a remembrance ("We've been married twenty-seven years"), the dissonance foreshadowing the ugly revelation to come.

Augusta's prevailing time signature is 4/4, which -- besides suggesting a foursquare outlook -- lends a militaristic cast to her music, as does her leitmotif, with its double-dotting and staccato quarter-notes:

Jagged melodic lines, octave leaps and broad-spanning phrases (high A to low C at one point) characterize her music, requiring a mezzo-soprano with working access across all three registers, as Bible demonstrates eloquently on the DG recording. Keith Clark, who conducted the University of Minnesota revival, explains the duple meter: "Augusta has twice the beats, the depth, the solidity of her husband."

Baby Doe enters to a waltz that will be her signature tune, and her music predominantly favors 3/4 time or multiples thereof. The waltz tune itself closes out the scene in more triumphal form, to show that Baby Doe has hooked her man, and opens Act II ...

... to signify Baby Doe's ascendancy. Moving in small, stepwise progressions, Baby Doe's music is largely diatonic, its coloratura understated, the proliferation of black notes lending it a folkish hue. Both the "Willow Song" and the finale are shaped in the eight-bar increments of popular song. The latter, known as the "Leadville Liebestod," shares the same key (B major) as Wagner's classic, shifting to the minor -- the "Tristan chord" -- whenever Baby Doe sings "love," while the letter aria, "Dearest Mama," demonstrates Moore's mastery of period-flavored, hearts-and-flowers tunes.

Initially accompanied by piano (whose arpeggiations are taken up by the orchestra), the "Willow Song" features extended melismas, as well as Baby Doe's highest excursion, a D-natural above the staff. Beverly Sills added a distinctive fillip to the aria's coda: a glissando from high B-flat -- elongated from an eighth note to a full measure -- to the final F (not notated in the score, but reproduced here):

Baby's aria provokes a memorably heartfelt response from Tabor, "Warm as the autumn light." The expansive cantilena of this aria is partly a function of Moore's metrical souplesse -- 12/8, 6/8, 9/8 and 3/4 are juxtaposed in four consecutive measures at one point. (Similar flexibility of pulse keeps the opera's lengthy stretches of heightened recititative lively and engrossing.) The coda that accompanies Tabor's kissing of Baby Doe's hand signifies the moment where the drama's seal is set:

The wedding scene, which closes the act, derives its lift from the prevailing 7/8, a fluid alternation of 3/8 and 4/8 bars. A squawking trombone glissando, which accompanies Tabor's overtures to the Washington dandies, underscores his clumsy, arriviste status. Here we meet Baby Doe's egregious Mama McCourt, a victim of terminal hoof-in-mouth disease. Mama derails the 7/8 buoyancy with indiscreet remarks about Tabor and Baby Doe's divorced spouses (droll, eighth-note downward runs on bassoon highlight the faux pas). Social disaster is neatly averted by the arrival of President Arthur, bringing the 7/8 festive theme with him to ring down the curtain.

The added cardroom scene opens to a menacing figure ...

... which -- in various permutations -- dominates the entire episode. Here, Tabor seals his doom by breaking with his party to back William Jennings Bryan. He rounds on his cronies with a vigorous aria ("Turn tail and run, then!"), its bravado subtly shading into desperation.

The Bryan rally that follows is one of the score's weaker episodes, though not without musical interest. For one thing, Bryan's march tune is in F-sharp, which Keith Clark considers the unlikeliest key for a march. Following Bryan's oration, the rideout (which cross-fades, attacca subito, into the next scene) is pierced by the tritone, a dissonance that punctuates the announcement of Bryan's -- and Tabor's -- defeat.

The penultimate scene's opening is laden with juxtaposed tritones and major seconds (the latter possibly hinting at a softening in Augusta's disposition). After another harangue from Mama McCourt, Augusta is allowed to give vent to her pain, both for and inflicted by Tabor. This justly celebrated aria, "Augusta! Augusta! How can you turn away?," brings her most stable and emotionally rewarding cantilena of the opera. "All her emotions were kept inside," says Bible, "so it's harder on the performer. After my first [performance], I was just worn out like a dish rag for three or four hours after. I found it more taxing than Amneris."

A honky-tonk burlesque of the Bryan campaign song opens the final scene, set on the dilapidated stage of the Leadville Opera House. In a phantasmagoric mad scene for baritone, Tabor relives his upbringing, the romantic early years with Augusta, the trek westward, the mining triumphs that brought him his millions. He sees his daughter, Silver Dollar, grown up, as a dissolute flapper (an episode drawing on Moore's Tin Pan Alley roots), and gets this telling reproof from the shade of Augusta: "You see me through your eyes. You do not see me truly as I was." Baby Doe's entry at this point sets up Tabor's poignantly understated demise and the "Leadville Liebestod."

Clark describes the full-score manuscript as "like bird scratchings, but [with] great understanding of how to use limited means." Although Baby Doe is economically scored (small wind and brass complements) and can be brought off sumptuously with as few as forty-four players, Moore avoids both tinniness and monotony in his scoring. This is accomplished through frequent rotation of the voice-leadings and timely splashes of color, especially from percussion and pit-piano.

The choral writing generally hews to black-note melodies and simple harmonizations. The notable exceptions occur in the final scene. Here, a ghostly quotation of the inscription from the curtain of the Tabor Grand Opera House by Charles Kingsley --

So fleet the works of man:
Back to the earth again
Ancient and holy things
Fade like a dream...

-- is set in close, four-part harmony, full of diminished chords and imitative counterpoint, what Clark calls the "only 'learnéd counterpoint'" in the score. A few bars earlier, Eugene Field's encomium to the Tabor Grand ("The opera house/A union grand/Of capital and labor;/Long will the stately structure stand,/A monument to Tabor") is set to the score's only six-part choral writing. These passages demonstrate the sophistication that Moore applied to this superficially "naive" story.

One final concern relates to the pacing of the score as a whole. Moore worked closely both on the staging and with Buckley, so the tempos in the DG recording can be taken as from the horse's mouth. "If it doesn't just hit you like a bat," says Bible, "like A Chorus Line, it kind of droops. It was terribly hard to sing it at that clip, but I think it paid off." Buckley was one of the few conductors who, when Moore demanded a passage be beat one-to-the-bar, actually did so. The original-cast recording clocks in at 113 minutes. Recent revivals in Central City and Des Moines were 135 and 145, respectively. At that crawl, what is cinematic becomes episodic, and sentiment is mushed into sentimentality -- an undeserved fate for the masterwork that is The Ballad of Baby Doe.

 

MR. MCKEE is classical-music critic for the Twin Cities Reader and a regular contributor to The Opera Quarterly and OPERA NEWS.

MUSICAL EXAMPLES: Copyright © (unpub.) 1956 by Douglas S. Moore and John Latouche. Copyrights renewed. Copyright © 1957 & 1958 by Douglas S. Moore and Rosalind Rock, as Administratrix of the Estate of John Latouche, deceased. Copyrights renewed. Chappell & Co., Inc., owner of publication and allied rights throughout the world.

International Copyright Secured. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Printed in the U.S.A.

photos: Courtesy Colorado Historical Society (portrait of Elizabeth "Baby Doe" Tabor), © Beth Bergman 1997 (Sills, Cassel)