So here's a slightly funny thing--this is, so say people, one of the best-known of American operas. It comes up near the beginning of the list if you google "American operas" (it used to be it was actually THE first to come up, but it's star has slightly fallen). Everyone insists that it's super-popular; the host of the recording that I watched called it "probably the most frequently performed of all the American operas." That seems just wildly not-true--you're probably thinking Porgy and Bess and maybe Susannah, which I'm quite sure are more popular than this, but I think the most-performed American opera is almost certainly Amahl and the Night Visitors--but he said it! That surely means something! And yet, for a long time, there weren't any recordings online; now there are two, both of dubious audiovisual quality, but still...seems weird. Regardless, I'd wanted to see it for a long time, so now I did. I watched this version, from 1976. It was recorded from PBS, so as you can imagine it doesn't look super-great, and there's hissing in the background, but truly, I have seen worse. It basically conveyed the story I think, though subtitles would've been just ducky.
This is based on real events, more closely than most operas. It's the late nineteenth century, and Horace Tabor is a fantastically wealthy silver baron in the town of Leadville, Colorado. So bully for him, but his relationship with his wife, Augusta, is on the skids, and when he meets Elizabeth "Baby" Doe, he quickly falls in love. She' married herself (though we see hide nor hair of her husband), and, disenchanted, is looking to hook this rich guy, but her mercenary motives quickly morph into real love (or so she tells herself--and who can say if she's right or wrong or what those things even mean). They divorce their spouses and get married, so bully for them I guess. But things quickly go south (duh): Horace is a stout opponent of the gold standard and supports William Jennings Bryan for President (who makes an appearance and sings an aria based on his "cross of gold" speech). When Bryan loses, this causes him to be ruined, apparently, through some unclear mechanism (the real Tabor lost his fortune through some economic panic that I'm too thick to comprehend). He has a series of hallucinations of his past, and then dies of being in an opera. Baby sings a final aria as the next thirty years goes by. The real Baby--and the one here, apparently--lived the last thirty years of her life in extreme asceticism in a shed near the Tabor mine. Seems excessive, but we all make our choices.
I did like this a lot. The libretto has some fairly typical operatic shortcomings--most notably that we never really gain any understanding of Horace's and Baby's relationship--but it's still a pretty good story, and you like to see a contemporary or almost-contemporary composer just including arias as a matter of course. Baby herself gets four or five of them; as I'm told, it's considered kind of a diva role, and you can see why. If it's true. Nothing could be true. I had no idea what it was about; I just had confused memories of that child murder case that was in the news some time ago. This is better than that. Actually, I'm going to call it: even the worst opera is superior to even the best infanticide. Why would I say something so controversial yet so brave? The world may never know.
Anyway, it's hard to arrange to match significant numbers with significant operas, since I've seen just about everything that most people would consider "significant," so this was probably as good a choice as any for opera number seven hundred.
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