CORNISH — Opera North begins its 44th season on Friday, June 26 with the delightful Rossini classic “La Cenerentola” (“Cinderella”) and ends on July 23 with a revival of the Broadway musical “Fiddler on the Roof” at Blow-Me-Down farm in Cornish.
Sandwiched between the two is the American opera “The Ballad of Baby Doe,” which has its Opera North premiere on July 12. It is rarely performed but deserves to better known, said Opera North general director Evans Haile.
Because the U.S. is celebrating its 250th anniversary on July 4, “it seemed very appropriate that we would do a great American opera,” Haile said.
Set in late 19th century Colorado, “The Ballad of Baby Doe” interweaves such quintessential American themes as striving for class and wealth, and the outsized iconography and history of the American West, told through the true story of mining magnate Horace Tabor, his first wife, Augusta, and his second, much younger wife, Elizabeth McCourt Tabor, aka Baby Doe.
Like many operas, Baby Doe doesn’t end well for its protagonists — financial ruin, alcoholism and in an unusual twist, hypothermia — but unpredictable turns of fate and tragic human flaws are the point.
Opera North artistic director Louis Burkot first encountered the opera in 1988 when he was an assistant conductor at Central City Opera in Colorado.
“I was smitten immediately,” Burkot said. “I knew it was a hybrid piece. After years of study I’ve realized how clever it was in blending musical theater and opera in one piece.”
Even though Baby Doe never made it to Broadway, “the minute you hear the music, you get it; it’s a Broadway show,” Burkot said.
Opera North has had a tradition, dating back to its infancy, of programming lesser-known operas and musicals that aren’t the obvious fare, by such composers as Aaron Copland, Kurt Weill and Benjamin Britten, along with the standards by Mozart, Puccini and Verdi. “The Ballad of Baby Doe” falls into that category, and has been on the Opera North wish list for some time, Haile said.
With a score by Douglas Moore and a libretto by Joe Latouche, the opera was first staged in Colorado in 1956 and had its East Coast premiere at New York City Opera in 1958, where a young soprano named Beverly Sills caused a stir as Baby Doe. It reached more people through a televised performance.
By the time “Baby Doe” was written, its tuneful melodies perhaps seemed old hat to impatient composers and critics as they migrated from tonal to atonal music. But atonalism often met a resistant audience, and in the 21st century, Burkot said, opera composers began to reconsider tonality.
“Suddenly an opera like ‘Baby Doe’ is looked at in a different light,” Burkot said.
Enumerating “Baby Doe’s” virtues, Burkot said, there is not a single wasted moment; and the “libretto is so poetic in narrative. I find that a very hard combination. There are lots of libretti that are beautifully poetic but you lose sight of who the characters are.”
The saga of Horace Tabor, born in Holland, Vt., his wife, and Baby Doe, whose rosebud beauty earned her that moniker, is of the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction school, said production director Linda Brovsky, originally from Colorado herself and now based in New York City.
After heading West with Augusta in the 1850s, Tabor, an abolitionist, made his fortune in silver mining in Leadville, Colorado, a muddy, unprepossessing town in the Rockies at 10,000 feet. When he met Baby Doe, he was instantly entranced, and, after 25 years of marriage, divorced Augusta. He was, briefly, a U.S. Senator, but was better known for his wealth, his philanthropy and as the builder of Leadville’s first and only opera house.
You couldn’t grow up in Colorado, and not know about Baby Doe and Horace Tabor, Brovsky said. “Pretty much anyone living in the Rocky Mountain area, whether you were in Colorado Springs, where I grew up, or Central City, or Denver, or Leadville, we all knew this story,” said Brovsky, who previously directed “The Marriage of Figaro” for Opera North.
The opera is rarely performed, Brovsky added, mostly because of its huge scale: a large cast, a chorus, dancers, numerous set changes and costumes. It’s too bad, she added, because it is “also one of the great American love stories.”
The production team has adapted the size of the cast and the production design to re-imagine Baby Doe for the Opera North audience and the smaller Blow-Me-Down stage, Brovsky said. The singers each play four to five parts, she said.
The love triangle and the dogged pursuit by the three protagonists of their own version of a 19th century American Dream are likely the elements that audiences most remember, Brovsky said.
“This particular show does hit into a lot of timely issues,” Haile said. It also pairs well, Haile said, with “Fiddler on the Roof,” the 1964 Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick classic about life in a Jewish shtetl in Tsarist Russia that ends with emigration to America, just as “Baby Doe” considers the waves of European and Chinese immigrants who came to work the mines.
Every year, Opera North programs a show that is inviting to families, which is where Rossini’s comic opera “La Cenerentola,” set here in New York’s Little Italy, fits the bill, Haile said.
And given global upheaval, high fuel prices and expensive airplane tickets, staying closer to home while also experiencing the world through exquisitely wrought words and music is an attractive option.
“If you want to experience the world,” Haile said, “Opera North is a great place to experience it.”
For information and tickets, go to operanorthnh.org.