San Francisco Classical Voice

With its sophisticated and melodious score, outstanding cast, handsome production, and intriguing dramatic limitations, San Francisco Opera's premiere production of Douglas Moore's The Ballad of Baby Doe made for entertaining and thought-provoking theater on Saturday evening. This work, usually cited as one of the finest American operas, has received little attention from major companies since it first appeared in 1956, and like Carlisle Floyd's Susannah and Copland's The Tender Land is benefiting from the current interest in American works, as more and more world-class American musicians and companies begin to explore our musical history. What we find is usually stylish, well crafted, and often beautiful, but flawed in interesting ways. This was the case with Baby Doe.

The title is misleading, because there are three main characters and Baby Doe is the least interesting and least developed of them. Based on a true story, the opera follows the career of a Gilded Age tycoon named Horace Tabor who went West and made a fortune in silver mines. James Morris as Tabor delighted the audience immediately by abandoning his Wotan-like dignity to do a little square dance during his patter song, "I came this way from Massachusetts." Looking just like Howard Keel in the movie Showboat (though without the smarminess), he proved downright debonair as a romantic lead.

Tabor has made himself the Ozymandias of Colorado, and every building in Leadville has his name on it, including the brand-new Tabor Opera House. But Tabor is a homespun American guy, and as we see in the first scene he would rather dance with the "Jezebels" from his own saloon than sit listening to a string quartet. This is a source of simmering tension with his wife, Augusta, who in this production looks more like his aunt, with tensely coiled up hair and Emily Dickinson glasses. Mezzo-soprano Judith Forst was marvelous as Augusta. She never let the character become a caricature of the social-climbing matron, but rather made Augusta a complex personality, her ambition, propriety, and strict judgment tempered with vulnerability and tenderness.

But Tabor has lost sight of Augusta's good qualities and falls like a ton of bricks for "Baby Doe," a golden-haired younger woman who has just arrived in town. Played by Ruth Ann Swenson, who looks adorable and floats enchanting high notes in all her arias, Baby Doe is the antithesis of Augusta, singing drawing room ballads and flattering Tabor's vanity. By the end of the first act, Tabor has divorced Augusta and married Baby Doe. He has also bought the Matchless Mine, a huge silver mine that he believes will make him a millionaire.

The first act gives a pretty complete picture of the opera's style. Moore and his librettist, John Latouche, follow a traditional, realistic dramaturgy, crafting their scenes around strong, clearly defined emotional situations. Each scene progresses smoothly through melodious arioso to a well-defined lyric number. Baby Doe's "Willow" ballad is followed by Tabor's impassioned declaration that in her singing he rediscovers his own youthful idealism. (Like many of his contemporaries, Moore turned to Puccini for passionate and romantic moments.) In the next scene, which I found less generic and therefore more moving, Augusta finds the lace gloves her husband has bought for Baby Doe and laments over her own aging, coarsened hands. The act begins and ends with scenes for the full ensemble, depicting the wide range of American society: from a mining town in the Colorado mountains to a posh society wedding in Washington, D.C.

Moore uses vernacular rhythms and brassy orchestration to give a recognizably "American" flavor to the score, but it never feels crude or even "folksy." Even in the impromptu square dance and in the waltz that opens the wedding scene, the dance rhythms come and go. They get interrupted, broken off, and obscured by surface irregularities. The rhythms are flexible and fragmentary, an elusive pulse beneath the surface.

Moore steers deftly between the two perils of text-setting in modern opera in English: His melodies are neither pointlessly spiky nor portentously slow. They flow along in a speechlike arioso, following the natural contours of the words. The singers' generally excellent diction, particularly that of Morris and Forst, made supertitles almost redundant.

Unlike the first act, which is devoted to the familiar operatic concerns of love and jealousy, Act II turns on the question of whether the United States will adopt the gold standard. Although I expect the political background of any opera to be sketchy, if not downright incomprehensible, the debate over bimetallism lacks the universal resonance of, say, the plight of oppressed Flanders in Don Carlos. But Moore and Latouche manage to contrive a series of strong scenes for their protagonist: Tabor brutally rejects Augusta's advice that he should sell the Matchless Mine, berates his friends for losing their faith in silver, and organizes a rally for the pro-silver candidate, William Jennings Bryan, which provides a third colorful crowd scene. John Fanning had an excellent cameo appearance as Bryan, sleek-haired and plump, and drunk on his own fulsome rhetoric.

Judith Forst's penultimate appearance — a long soliloquy in which she ponders, and decides against, helping the destitute Horace and Baby Doe — was a musical and psychological high point. The character's self-awareness, pride, and pain, already seen in Act I, culminate here in the aria "Augusta, why do you turn away?" It is one of several dramatic inconsistencies that Augusta, whom Horace has rejected on account of her alleged coldness, should be so complex and touching. He caricatures her as a greedy shrew, but the opera lets us see how his stubbornness has thwarted her generous impulses. Her emotions and music are richer and more compellingly human than Baby Doe's blind devotion, which the opera seems to idealize.

Morris gave a powerful performance as Tabor, depicting his visionary ambition, his passionate emotions, his charisma, and his rage and despair over his collapsing fortunes. But his portrayal was ultimately limited by the role itself, because the composer and librettist didn't (or couldn't) decide whether Tabor is a tragic hero. For most of the second act he sees himself that way, as a representative of frontier America crucified on Bryan's "cross of gold." But he's also something far less sympathetic: a stubborn man who defeats himself by refusing to change in response to outside influence, whether from his first wife, his friends, or the clear signs that silver is bound to crash. By the end, it's hard to distinguish his decisiveness from pigheadedness.

This creates a similar incoherence in the opera's depiction of Tabor and Baby Doe's shared fate. I think we're supposed to take them as an ideal couple, with her unquestioning devotion the perfect and necessary complement to his masculine decisiveness. Their mutual adoration endures because she never questions or judges him. The opera wants us to admire her as one of those transcendentally self-sacrificing women idealized in Wagner, "faithful unto death." But the modern setting, naturalistic tone, and pragmatic material (mortgages, currency, bankruptcy) all undermine the epic or mythic glamour of such a love.

The Ballad of Baby Doe has strong situations but no strong conflicts. Tabor's inexorable decline is less a drama than a fatalistic pageant, a series of episodes leading toward a foregone conclusion. There is action but no suspense, for at no point did I believe that things might have turned out differently. Unexpectedly enough, its closest cousin may be The Rake's Progress, which had premiered only three years earlier. Although their external details and style couldn't be more different, both operas chart the rise and fall of an ambitious, good-hearted, but not entirely sympathetic man as he makes and loses a fortune, goes mad, and finally rests his fevered head in the lap of his true-hearted, golden-haired sweetheart, who comforts him with a melancholy lullaby. But Baby Doe lacks Stravinsky's bracing irony, and tries instead to recruit our sympathy for a hero who's not quite heroic, a love story that strives for tragedy but doesn't get beyond pathos.

(Heather Hadlock is Assistant Professor of Music History at Stanford University.)

©2000 Heather Hadlock, all rights reserved