The 1950s turned out to be a tricky time for Aaron Copland, the master of Americana, to create his first major opera. In a period of mass-neuroses typified by Senator McCarthy’s Communist witch-hunts, Copland found himself less sure of his standing as a darling of the music world.
When Copland composed The Tender Land in 1953, an opera that he expected would be broadcast on television across the country, he was unprepared for the knock-back from NBC.
The Tender Land was finally reworked for the stage, but it retains many features that betray its original conception for the small screen. It’s a gentle rural Midwest story which Copland and his librettist Erik Johns based on the iconic Depression-era images of Walker Evans. The tale is a parable of xenophobia, lost innocence and passionate restlessness, in which a girl falls in love and leaves home on the eve of her graduation.
The first full production of The Tender Land in Australia was staged earlier this year by Melbourne’s Lyric Opera. The production showed that this simple tale has real power and currency. Moreover it’s a little-known and underrated work that highlights what an extraordinary composer Aaron Copland really was, and what a good instinct he had for articulating the American psyche.
Soprano Emily Uhlrich as Laurie Mos in the
Lyric Opera of Melbourne production of The Tender Land.
[© Henry Choo, 2014]
First broadcast on Into The Music, ABC RN, on 11-10-2014
Guests
John Kachoyan—Theatre Director, based in Melbourne
Pat Miller—Conductor and Musical Director for Lyric Opera of Melbourne
Beth E. Levy—Associate Professor of Music at the University of California, Davis
Rob Hansen—Musicologist based in Sydney
Emily Uhlrich—Melbourne-based soprano
Henry Choo—Melbourne-based tenor
Publications
Title—Frontier Figures: American Music and the Mythology of the American West
Author—Beth E. Levy
Publisher—University of California Press, 2012
ISBN—9780520267787
Title—Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families
Author—James Agee & Walker Evans
Publisher—Violette Editions, UK, 2001 (first published in 1941)
Wikipedia—http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_Us_Now_Praise_Famous_Men
ISBN—9781900828154
Title—Music for the Common Man: Aaron Copland during the Depression and War
Author—Elizabeth B. Crist
Publisher—Oxford University Press, 2005
ISBN—9780195383591
Further Information
James Agee Films (The full unedited interview with Allie Mae Burroughs is available via this website)
Credits
Producer—Michael Shirrefs
Sound Engineers—Matthew Crawford & Brendan O’Neill
Reader—Scott Stephens
© 2014—Michael Shirrefs & ABC RN