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The Tender Land (1952-54)
Born in Brooklyn, New York, on November 14, 1900 -- we celebrate his 100th
birthday this year -- Copland's early compositions were influenced by the
jazz craze that swept Europe and America during the 1920s, but by the
mid-1930s he had developed the open, spare, economic style that would become
uniquely evocative of rural America. Expressed in the film scores to Of Mice
and Men, Our Town and The Red Pony, and the ballets Billy the Kid, Rodeo and
Appalachian Spring, this style reached its apogee in Copland's opera The
Tender Land.
Copland's only other opera was a work designed to be performed and staged by
young people called The Second Hurricane, composed in 1937 for the Henry
Street Settlement Music School where he was teaching at the time. He was
leery of tackling a full-length adult opera, calling it "a very
problematical form -- la forme fatale," but was encouraged by the
popularity of modern opera after the Second World War, particularly those by
Benjamin Britten and Gian-Carlo Menotti, the increasing frequency of operas
performed by music and drama departments on college campuses, and the
growing interest in television; Menotti's opera Amahl and the Night Visitors
had become a Christmas favorite of viewers in the early 1950s.
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Early in 1952, Copland accepted a commission from the League of Composers to write an opera for television with a grant provided by the songwriting team of Rodgers and Hammerstein. Copland considered collaborations with authors such as Thornton Wilder, Clifford Odets and Arthur Miller, but eventually turned to his lover at that time, dancer Erik Johns, for the libretto. Copland explained, "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." The inspiration for The Tender Land came from a book by James Agee called Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, with accompanying photographs by Walker Evans. Originally planned as a 1936 photo essay for Fortune magazine about tenant farmers in the Deep South, the book, published in 1941, consisted of in-depth interviews and pictures of three poor families in a small Alabama town, bringing a moving humanity to the subject of poverty in rural America. In his libretto, Johns (using the pseudonym Horace Everett) retained the period of the 1930s captured by the photographs, but transferred to locale to the Midwest. Copland and Johns decided on an operatic form in which the set pieces -- arias, duets and ensemble numbers -- would be embedded in a continuous flow of music, often stylistically indistinguishable from the surrounding dialogue; Johns described The Tender Land as "in the nature of an operatic tone poem." Despite its clearly American flavor, Copland used only three actual American folk tunes in the opera: "Zion's Walls," "Cottage by the Sea" and "If You Want to Go A-Courting." One commentator noted, "Copland 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," while another suggested that the opera comprised "the essential musical speech of Middle America; plain, hard, wary of exaggeration or excess." Although intended for television, Copland and Johns were unable to find an interested network, so The Tender Land was introduced by the New York City Opera on April 1, 1954 in a production conducted by Thomas Schippers and directed by Jerome Robbins. Originally in two acts, in response to adverse critical reaction (directed primarily at the libretto) Copland and Johns revised the opera as a three-act work which opened to more favorable reviews at the Tanglewood Music Festival on August 2, 1954. After a few additional revisions, Oberlin College gave the premiere of the final version on May 20, 1955. Copland's interest in opera after The Tender Land remained undiminished; he was deeply appreciative of later works by Britten, Hans Werner Henze and Luigi Nono, as well as American operas by Douglas Moore and Hugo Weisgall. For a number of years he hoped to compose another work for the stage, but was unable to find a libretto that suited him. In his memoirs he noted, "I admit that if I have one regret, it is that I never did write a 'grand opera.'"
Suggested recordings: • Program notes by Lawrence Duckles  |
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