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Aaron the opera composer?
Copland’s The Tender Land
BY DAVID WEININGER

Mark your calendar this week, Wednesday and Thursday, for a production of Aaron Copland’s rarely performed opera The Tender Land. Yes, it’s true that Copland’s name doesn’t leap to mind when you think of the great opera composers. He admitted as much in his autobiography: "When I was a student in Paris in the ’20s, nobody was interested in opera — nobody, that is, who cared about ‘new music.’ We were all interested in ballet." Not surprising for a composer who produced great ballet scores like Rodeo and Appalachian Spring. He even referred to opera as "la forme fatale."

A commission from the League of Composers in 1952 was the impetus for The Tender Land, which Copland had initially intended as a television production on NBC, though the network rejected the plan that the composer submitted. New York City Opera stepped in and offered to stage it, and the premiere took place in 1954. Copland’s then-partner, Erik Johns, wrote the libretto under the nom de guerre of Horace Everett.

For inspiration, Copland and Johns turned to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee & Walker Evans’s searing photographic record of Southern sharecroppers in the midst of the Depression. Johns transplanted the characters onto a farm in Middle America and created a typically American story of small-town inhabitants and outsiders. The plot focuses on what happens to the Hoss Family when two drifters from the city, Top and Martin, come to the Hoss farm looking for work. To Laurie Hoss, the teenage daughter who’s about to graduate from high school, these strangers represent the possibility of freedom from the confines of her insulated world. To her grandfather and the rest of the town, they represent the invasion of urban otherness.

The climax arrives when Top and Martin are accused of a rape that took place before the drama begins. They’re found innocent, but Grandpa Hoss is heard to exclaim, "They’re guilty all the same" — perhaps a reference to Copland’s appearance before the House Committee on Un-American Activities just months before he began work on The Tender Land. The opera closes with Laurie’s decision to leave her home and make her own way in the world.

It’s not an especially original story (though good operas have been written with less), and Copland’s use of then-current vernacular is apt to strike you as thoroughly outmoded. And since he wrote the work for young singers rather than international stars, the vocal lines have more in common with Rodgers & Hammerstein than with his opera contemporaries. The music, on the other hand, is written in the open, spacious style that seemed to come so naturally to Copland. It’s mostly diatonic, and dissonance is kept to minimum, but there’s a strength and subtlety that link it to his ballets, especially Appalachian Spring.

So even if The Tender Land isn’t the Great American Opera (has there ever been one?), it’s eminently worth a listen. And since the opportunity doesn’t come around very often, you’re advised to take advantage of this week’s performances by the New England Conservatory Opera Theater, with Marc Astafan directing and Beatrice Affron conducting. That’s at NEC’s Jordan Hall, 30 Gainsborough Street, January 29 and 30 at 8 p.m. Tickets are $14; call (617) 585-1100.

FURTHERMORE. We don’t see much of the Arditti Quartet round these parts, since the intrepid new-music specialists are usually kept busy in Europe. But they’ve slipped in under the radar to play a free concert this Friday, January 24, at MIT’s Kresge Auditorium, with a program that includes the premiere of a quartet by Laura Elise Schwendinger plus works by Bartók and Ligeti as the "old standbys." It’s at 8 p.m.; call (617) 253-2826. The Handel & Haydn Society offers a program of ballet from the "golden age of the French monarchy," with music from Destouches’ Les éléments, Charpentier’s La descente d’Orphée aux enfers, and Rameau’s La fête d’Hébé. Performances are January 31 at 8 p.m. at Jordan Hall and February 2 at 3 p.m. at Harvard’s Sanders Theatre. Tickets are $28 to 56; call (617) 266-3605 or go to www.handelandhaydn.org. And the FleetBoston Celebrity Series presents mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves in a Symphony Hall recital with pianist Warren Jones. The program ranges from Dowland to Brahms to spirituals. That’s on February 2 at 3 p.m., and tickets range from $45 to $60; call (617) 482-6661.

Issue Date: Janaury 23 - 30, 2003

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