Aaron Copland The Promise of Living

Aaron Copland's second opera, The Tender Land, is mostly seen as a rather sentimental piece - there's a story that once during rehearsals of music from it, the orchestra players ridiculed it as "the tender gland".   But the story, itself is anything but sentimental and it certainly doesn't have a happy ending,  the two drifters keep on drifting and Laurie who was planning on leaving with the younger of them decides that she has to leave, even before her graduation from high school. I agree with Anthony Tomasini, about the opera, not the production that I didn't hear.

Rejected for broadcast by NBC, "The Tender Land," with a libretto by Erik Johns [Aaron Copland's partner, at the time], was given its premiere by the New York City Opera in 1954. The tepid reception to the work was a disappointment for the composer, who sounded almost apologetic in talking about the score. The music was "very plain, with a colloquial flavor," he wrote, "closer to musical theater than to grand opera."

Maybe so. But you can only hope that Copland finally understood what an affecting, honest and musically elegant work this modest opera can be in a sensitive production, like the one that opened here on Thursday night at Bard College, part of the school's SummerScape festival. The opera is being presented in the version prepared by the conductor Murry Sidlin for a 1987 revival, with the orchestra effectively reduced to an ensemble of 13 instruments. Bard College's Theater Two at the new Fisher Center for the Performing Arts proved an ideally intimate space for this wistful chamber opera.

... Set in the rural Midwest at harvest time in the 1930's, the story tells of Laurie Moss, who is about to graduate from high school, the first member of her farming family to do so. Her wizened mother, Ma Moss, and her fearsomely protective grandfather, who have raised her, are giving a party to celebrate Laurie's achievement that night. Two drifters come by looking for work, and despite his suspicions, Grandpa Moss hires them. Laurie, who cannot fathom what her future will be, who is both tied to her homeland and aching to leave it, is intrigued by tales of their travels. The dashing smooth-talking Top, full of bluster, immediately eyes Laurie. But it's the younger, bashful Martin for whom she falls, with disastrous consequences.

A production that kept the wistfulness to a minimum could do a lot to help the opera.  Having witnessed and, to a mild extent, experienced farms where everything needs repair and there's not enough money and more than enough hard times, wistfulness isn't generally what the people who live on them experience.  Not to mention the lives of destitute drifters who don't even have that much material security.

The most well known piece from the opera, the quintet The Promise of Living, has, rightly, become a classic, in itself.  This is the best performance of it I've heard, it makes me wish I could find a dvd of the entire production.

Berkeley Opera production, April 2010.
Sung by Paul Cheak, Lee Steward, Amy Foote, Malin Fritz, Paul Murray. Conducted by Philip Kuttner,

It is in the lives of The People that the real hope of life comes from, not from Constitutional theories or the kinds of politics that used to be scribbled about in small-circulation magazines or loud-mouthed bromides and platitudes that come from millionaires on the radio and TV.  If this brings a tear to your eye, it's because that simple fact is well worth getting choked up about, no matter how corny it might sound through the filter of cynical sophistication.   This isn't Disney, it's the real thing that Disney and a thousand other Hollywood capitalists stole and turned into a cliche.   But Copland owned it first and his intention is what should rule.