'The Ballad of Baby Doe'

Synopsis

On today’s date in 1956, one of the most successful of all American operas had its first performance at the Center Opera House in Colorado. The Ballad of Baby Doe was created by composer Douglas Moore and librettist John Latouche, and was based on a real-life tale of love and loss that had played out in that state.

Elizabeth McCourt Tabor, better known as “Baby Doe,” became the second wife of Colorado prospector, businessman and politician Horace Tabor in 1883. Tabor’s messy divorce and remarriage to the young and beautiful Baby Doe was a major scandal at the time. He was immensely wealthy, and had built an Opera House that bears his name and still stands in Leadville, Colorado, where he met Baby Doe. In 1899, he had lost his entire fortune, and after his death, Baby Doe lived on in a poor miner’s shack near Leadville, where she was found frozen to death in 1935.

And it was on a cold winter’s day — a year before the premiere of their new opera — that Moore and Latouche paid a visit to Tabor’s Opera House in Leadville and stood on its stage for inspiration. A witness of their visit recalled: “I was intensely aware of a great and eerie silence that suddenly came over the building. If ever there were ghosts of the past in the Tabor Opera House I could believe that they were there at that moment!”

Music Played in Today's Program

Douglas Moore (1893-1969): The Ballad of Baby Doe; Jan Grissom, soprano; Central City Opera Orchestra; John Moriarty, conductor; Newport Classics 85593

On This Day

Births

• 1860 - Austrian composer and conductor Gustav Mahler, in Kalischt, Bohemia

• 1911 - Italian-born American composer and conductor Gian Carlo Menotti, in Cadegliano

• 1940 - Drummer and songwriter Ringo Starr (of the Beatles), in Liverpool, England

Deaths

• 1968 - American organist and composer Leo Sowerby, 73, in Port Clinton, Ohio

Premieres

• 1713 - Handel: Utrecht Te Deum, at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London (Gregorian Date: July 18)

• 1956 - Moore: opera The Ballad of Baby Doe, in Center City, Colorado. According to Opera America, this is one of the most frequently-produced American operas during the past decade.

• 1994 - John Williams: Cello Concerto, at the opening of Ozawa Hall at Tanglewood, Mass., by the Boston Symphony, with the composer conducting and Yo-Yo Ma the soloist

• 2001 - David Ward-Steinman: Dublin Down, for two pianos, during the College Music Society International Conference in Limerick, Ireland, by the composer and Patrice Madura Ward-Steinman

Others

• 1720 - Funeral of J.S. Bach’s first wife, Maria Barbara (35). The cause of her death is unknown, and Bach’s son Carl Philip Emmanuel reported his father was at Carlsbad when she died: “The news that she had been ill and died reached him only when he entered his own house.”

• 1747 - J.S. Bach dedicates his Musical Offering to Frederich the Great of Prussia

• 1791 - Haydn conducts his Symphony No. 92 (Oxford) at the Sheldonian Theater of Oxford University, where he was awarded an honorary degree