After the mayor issued a musical proclamation, and after Norway’s ambassador to the United States gave a speech about her country’s far-reaching history in the Midwest, Jennifer Teisinger, the executive director of the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra, came out with a look of pleasant surprise, and more than a little pride.
“How many orchestras,” she asked from the stage of Mary W. Sommervold Hall in Sioux Falls, “have the mayor and the ambassador of Norway onstage for the same concert?”
True, orchestral concerts don’t usually get that kind of attention. But on a recent Saturday evening, the South Dakota Symphony was offering something extraordinary enough to warrant it: the first performance of Douglas Moore’s opera “Giants in the Earth” in over 50 years.
An adaptation of O.E. Rolvaag’s novel, a Midwestern classic about Norwegian immigrants who settle near present-day Sioux Falls in the late 19th century, Moore’s opera premiered in 1951, quickly won the Pulitzer Prize for music, then practically disappeared. It was never recorded, and the full score was never published. A revised version was performed at the University of North Dakota a couple of decades later. But that, too, came and went with little notice or consequence.
Before the South Dakota Symphony’s concerts last month, “Giants” hadn’t been heard since then. In Sioux Falls, it has been painstakingly restored, with a recording on the way and its manuscript score engraved at last, ready for publication. Delta David Gier, the orchestra’s transformative music director, has referred to the opera as “a diamond on the side of the road.” Now, it’s more like a gemstone on display.
Even so, will people notice it? “Giants” is far from perfect, but in style and subject matter is American opera in its essence: a grand, dramatic treatment of the promise and agony of this country’s melting-pot identity, as precarious and unresolved for immigrants in the 19th century as it is now.
There is no easy explanation for why “Giants” failed to take root. The fate of any opera is difficult to predict; today’s classics weren’t always classics, and many hits of the past have long since dropped off the boards.
American operas in particular have fared poorly, especially those written in the middle of the 20th century. But even then, Moore was composing outside the mainstream, with a polite, nostalgic sensibility craved by few, whether postwar avant-gardists or tonal populists like Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein.
Born on Long Island in 1893, Moore had an early passion for theater, followed by music. He wrote humble pieces in school and, when he got to Yale University, fight songs. Later, in the Navy during World War I, he wrote entertainments for his fellow sailors.
As Moore began to study composition seriously, he learned from some of the 20th century’s most famous teachers, including Ernest Bloch at the Cleveland Institute of Music and Nadia Boulanger in Paris. When he returned to the United States, he became a teacher, too, and spent nearly four decades at Columbia University.
He wrote music appreciation books and composed steadily, with a breakout opera in 1939, “The Devil and Daniel Webster,” which premiered on Broadway, directed by John Houseman and conducted by Fritz Reiner. By then, Moore was deep into his preoccupation with American subjects, like P.T. Barnum and “Moby-Dick.”
Throughout his composing career, his style was conservative, sometimes even dully genial, with unabashed sentimentality and a love for old American songs and folk music. But while composers like Copland and Virgil Thomson quoted popular tunes, Moore preferred to write his own. In “Giants,” there are original takes on working and drinking songs, and a religious hymn, though, in an exception for him, he also weaves in a bit of the Norwegian national anthem.
Moore’s appetite for Americana had him primed to write “Giants” when he met the author Arnold Sundgaard at Columbia in 1948. Sundgaard had recently written the libretto for Kurt Weill’s “Down in the Valley,” and when Moore asked him what other ideas he might have for an opera, he mentioned Rolvaag’s novel.
Moore hadn’t written a proper opera since “The Devil and Daniel Webster,” but he was lured back to the art form, he told Harold C. Schonberg in a New York Times interview, by Sundgaard’s suggestion to adapt Rolvaag’s novel. They got started on the project, and condensed the saga’s 500-plus pages into four scenes; like “La Bohème,” this work would tell its story through discrete, episodic moments in time. Sundgaard’s resulting libretto still captured the different ways a community of Norwegian settlers adapted to life on the harshly oceanic plains of South Dakota, but it also focused on the relationship between the book’s central couple, Per and Beret Hansa, with the declarations of love and devotion that opera fans often expect.
The score, however, resists other genre conventions. Moore composed “Giants” like a Wagner drama, setting the libretto to music but rarely repeating text and almost never stopping to linger for an aria. That may be a reason it disappeared; it couldn’t be excerpted for recitals and competitions.
In its fluidity, the vocal writing also resembles music by Janacek and Debussy, with rhythms following the natural contours of speech. Jerry L. McBride, in his book “Douglas Moore: A Bio-Bibliography,” recounts how Moore would read text aloud, repeatedly, before beginning to compose. With “Giants” he wanted, as he told Schonberg, “to achieve the pace of a play rather than of an opera.”
On first listen, Moore doesn’t appear to use the orchestra to complicate the libretto with subtext, but to support it, having the instruments emerge and retreat as needed in service of vocal clarity. Listen more closely, though, to the opera’s opening. Over sustained strings, a bassoon lets out a theme like a pastoral reveille, which is passed to a horn and then a trumpet. When the first two singers enter, their melodies are new, and unrelated. Yet the orchestra continues to play the theme from earlier, as if embodying the land itself, continuing onward, indifferent to the people around it.
There are other natural forces at work, including a swarm of locusts and a blizzard, and Moore conjures their drama more than their literal sound. He similarly signals what listeners need to know about Per and Beret through their vocal writing. Even without words, you could get a sense of Per’s resolute character though his generally long-held notes, delivered at a powerful volume. Beret, on the other hand, is given more complicated phrases, with melodies that briskly rise and fall, reflecting a restless, unsettled mind.
That is the real drama of “Giants”: Beret’s struggle to adapt. Her thinly veiled mental illness is almost a bodily rejection of the immigrant experience, as if it were a transplanted organ. In the first act she sings the brief, lilting aria “The quiet, the quiet,” and from there her role is written like a protracted crescendo. By the third act, she hardly ends a line without an exclamation as she unravels, eventually sending Per on a fatal journey into the blizzard. When she realizes what she has done, she lets out a high B flat that melts with a downward portamento, in a musicalized scream that ends the opera.
“Giants” premiered at Columbia in spring 1951. Even the school paper gave it a negative review. The New York Times’s Olin Downes applauded Moore’s craft, which skillfully contains all that you could ask for in opera, like large choruses, a dance-filled wedding and a mad scene. But he faulted the libretto, and wrote that Moore “seldom finds the phrase that will make unforgettable the word or the dramatic essence of a situation in a manner that seizes you.”
Sundgaard’s libretto really is the weakest element of the opera. (At its most unfortunate, it unfolds with the naïve couplets of children’s poetry, for example rhyming “held this spoon” with “one Sunday afternoon.”) The roles may be clearly defined, but with the exception of Beret, they remain static despite the story’s forward motion.
Yet when the Pulitzer Prizes were announced in 1951, “Giants” was the winner. The jury found it fresh and distinctive, a landmark for American opera. A logical next step would have been a major professional staging, but that wasn’t possible; Rolvaag’s estate was in the process of negotiating film rights for the story, so Moore’s adaptation was in limbo. By the time he could make a move, there wasn’t enough interest to justify a revival, and he was about to embark on his masterpiece, “The Ballad of Baby Doe.”
He returned to “Giants” in the 1960s, streamlining the score to a running time of about 90 minutes, but that version wasn’t performed until 1974, and for only two days in North Dakota. After that, the score languished in manuscript form.
That is, until Gier became the music director in Sioux Falls two decades ago. Gier, who has spent his tenure setting a standard for what an orchestra tied to its community looks like, was given a copy of Rolvaag’s novel early on. He was told, he said in a preconcert talk at Sommervold Hall, “If you want to understand people here, you need to read this book.” (A few years before Gier arrived, the cabin in which Rolvaag wrote “Giants” was moved from Minnesota to Augustana University in Sioux Falls.)
Once Gier became aware of Moore’s adaptation, he tried to learn more about it. He reached out to the publisher Theodore Presser and was sent an unwieldy box of manuscript scores. Eventually, he tracked down an archival recording of the original production, which he called “wretched.” But, like Per Hansa, he saw nothing but potential, and undertook a yearslong project to revive the opera, helped by a foundational, $2 million gift from the Waste Management fortune of Dean and Rosemarie Buntrock and money from about two dozen additional sources.
Given just short of a full staging by Robert Neu, the concert was presented with the high standard you can also hear on the South Dakota Symphony’s recent recordings of its Lakota Music Project and John Luther Adams’s “An Atlas of Deep Time.” The evening featured a cast led by the soprano Meredith Lustig, who grippingly sang the role of Beret with alternatingly controlled and unleashed intensity.
She may have received the biggest applause among the singers, but the most enthusiasm was reserved for Gier, who was closing out the South Dakota Symphony’s season with one of the ensemble’s great achievements, for the community and American opera alike. This art form is full of works like “Giants.” And while it still may not find a place in the repertoire, now, at least, it has a fighting chance.
Joshua Barone is the assistant classical music and dance editor on the Culture Desk and a contributing classical music critic.
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