American Gothic – Aaron Copland The Tender Land, Glimmerglass 2010, by Seth Lachterman

American Gothic – Aaron Copland’s 

The Tender Land
, Glimmerglass 2010

The Tender Land

Music by Aaron Copland
Libretto by Horace Everett (Erik Johns)

Conductor

, Stewart Robertson
Director, Tazewell Thompson
Sets, Donald Eastman
Costumes, Andrea Hood
Lighting, Robert Wierzel
Assistant Conductor, Zachary Schwartzman
Assistant Director, E. Reed Fisher
Chorus Master, Bonnie Koestner
Principal Coach/Accompanist, Jocelyn Dueck
Assistant Coach/Accompanist, Clinton Smith
Stage Manager, E. Reed Fisher
Projected Titles, Kelley Rourke
Hair and Makeup Design, Anne Ford-Coates

Cast

Laurie Moss, Lindsay Russell
Martin, Andrew Stenson
Top, Mark Diamond
Ma Moss, Stephanie Foley Davis
Mr. Splinters, Chris Lysack
Grandpa Moss, Joseph Barron
Mrs. Jenks, Jamilyn Manning-White
Beth Moss, Rebecca Jo Loeb
Mrs. Splinters, Claire Shackleton
Mr. Jenks, Will Liverman

Press-thetenderland-kcadel-004
Andrew Stenson as Martin and Lindsay Russell as Laurie Moss in Glimmerglass Opera's 2010 production of The Tender Land. Photo: Karli Cadel/Glimmerglass Opera

In a year that has seen several stellar productions of Thorton Wilder’s Our Town (for example, Walking the Dog Theater at PS21and the Williamstown Theater), perhaps it is a necessary corrective to experience Copland’s subtle and discomfiting The Tender Land. Copland’s collaboration in the 1940 film version of the Wilder classic has helped to promulgate the myth of a gingham-and-apple-pie-innocence as the psycho-social basis of the Rural American Gothic. As beautifully Transcendentalist as Our Town is in depicting the ethos of a 1900s New England town, the darker, narrow-minded qualities of insularity should not be overlooked. Copland’s score for the film has abetted the play in providing a heart-string-pulling idealization of what family life could be, but what always remains an elusive fiction. The Tender Land, Copland’s only full-length opera, and a work whose final shape would trouble him for years, is something like Of Mice and Men Meets Grover’s Corners. Copland, of course, wrote the music for the film version of Steinbeck’s tragic tale, and probably appreciated how “different from us folk” really works in the cemented close-mindedness of much of this country. It’s easy to imagine personal motives for Copland’s stirrings away from Wilder’s benignity. Copland was comfortable and public about his homosexuality, and Wilder was apparently repressive and closeted. Both artists having reached the status of Deans of American Arts, with hugely popular appeal, one could imagine the daring Copland having some interest in the heartbreak borne of those on the peripheries of the socially phobic grass-fed American family. Perhaps something like this was on his mind when the composer saw the photographs of depression-era sharecroppers in James Agee’s and Walker Evans’s 1941 book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

Read the full review on the Berkshire Review for the Arts!

Michael Miller