S/iy Venture

Secure in his top rank among contemporary U.S. composers of symphonic music, Aaron Copland last week took the plunge into opera. Shy about his venture, Veteran (53) Composer Copland first thought of launching The Tender Land (a story of the rural Midwest) far from the calloused ears of Manhattan critics ("I thought maybe Canada"). Then came an irresistible offer to open it at the New York City Opera, and Copland gave in.

Clean-Scrubbed Kansas. His opening curtain rose on a prairie-farmyard scene. His characters were plain, salt-of-the-earth folk: a grandfather (Basso Normaiv Treigle), a mother (Contralto Jean Hand-zlik), daughter Laurie (Soprano Rosemary Carlos) and a pair of drifting farmhands. The plot, such as it was, moved from Laurie's high-school pregraduation party through a brief, unrealistic courtship ("I'd like to have a wife for a while," sang one of the drifters), and ended on a symbolic note by sending the girl off in search of her future.

Composer Copland turned in a compact (95 minutes), clean-scrubbed score. The opera's melodic high point was an eight-minute love duet. Elsewhere, Copland managed to give a fairly musical lift to such prosy lines as "Not for me, Mrs. Moss. I've already had three helpings." By the supporting fullness of his orchestra, he also made the singers' voices sound warmer than they do in most contemporary opera. But his music slid too easily from one cool harmony to another, and on the whole, held as little punch as the libretto. When it was over, the audience gave a long round of applause that was more polite than enthusiastic.

Sere-Faced Farmers. Brooklyn-born Aaron Copland has no rural roots of his own (although his mother was raised in Peoria), but always knew he wanted to write an "American" opera. A dozen years ago, he read Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a prose poem about the hardscrabble South by James Agee, with photographs by Walker Evans. Copland found it inspiring, afterward showed it to his librettist, Poet Horace Everett,* who was struck by the photographs of serefaced farmers and their families. Everett transferred the setting from the South to Kansas and finished the libretto two years ago.

As opening night drew near, Copland's shy doubts returned. The Tender Land, as he conceived it, was really only a step along the road to a full-evening opera to come; perhaps he was wrong to show it in Manhattan at all. He also worried about the human element: "When I write a symphony," he says, "I know the orchestra and just how it will play my music." Singers are comparatively unpredictable. But more important to Stylist Copland was the fact that he had foregone "the absolute originality of every measure," turned in an uncharacteristically relaxed score. "This is not," he smiled, "the opera the critics were waiting for me to write--if they were waiting."

* Also a painter under the name Eric Johns.

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