Uptown Opens With ‘Ballad’

Riches and power, pride and arrogance, love and death are the stuff of drama from Greek tragedy onward. And they are also the ingredients of “The Ballad of Baby Doe.”

Uptown Opera begins its 11th season Friday with the first of seven performances of Douglas Moore’s 1956 operatic retelling of the real-life story of Colorado silver king Horace Tabor, his proud first wife, Augusta, and his beautiful, vivacious second wife, Elizabeth (“Baby”) Doe.

Tabor, a moderately successful storekeeper in Leadville, began to make a fortune in Colorado silver mining in 1878, lived an opulent life in Leadville and Denver in the ‘80s, and lost it all in the change to the gold standard in the 1890s. Tabor died penniless in 1899, pathetically hopeful for the return to the free coinage of silver.

Tabor was survived by his second wife, who died in 1935, found frozen to death in a cabin next to Tabor’s played-out Matchless Mine, a property he made Baby promise never to sell.

“This opera is a history lesson,” says Bill Graham, Uptown Opera’s co-founder and the director of this production.

Moore was a composer whose fascination with history led to the composition of several operas and orchestral works on historical characters - Daniel Webster, P.T. Barnum, Jesse James and Carrie Nation, among others. Moore read about Baby Doe Tabor’s death in the New York newspapers and thought her story would make a great operatic subject.

It took 20 years and a commission from Colorado’s Central City Opera to bring Moore’s project to fruition. Ironically, Central City made the commission to celebrate the centennial of the discovery of gold in Colorado, the element that brought Tabor’s downfall.

Since its Central City premiere in 1956 and the subsequent New York City Opera production in 1958, “The Ballad of Baby Doe” has been performed more times than any other American opera with the exception of the much smaller scaled “Amahl and the Night Visitors.”

Beverly Sills, opera’s most famous Baby Doe, credits Moore as “a composer who knew how to write for the human voice, which, I must tell you, is unusual. To sing Baby Doe is like medicine on the vocal cords.”

Moore, Yale-trained and a professor at Columbia, was also the master of the “period piece.” He could write a march, a political campaign song, a sentimental parlor ballad, or a six-part madrigal with equal ease. “But this is completely, thoroughly an original work,” Sills says. “And it shows that one’s ears do not have to be assaulted in order for something to be called ‘contemporary music.’ “

Uptown Opera’s Baby Doe, soprano Camille Kowash, was an apprentice at Central City Opera when the company celebrated the 40th anniversary of the premiere of “The Ballad of Baby Doe” last summer. Kowash is heard as a chorister in the Newport Classics recording of the work made at Central City. She is a recent graduate of the New England Conservatory in Boston, where she studied with Helen Hodam.

Robert Newman, who sings the role of Horace Tabor, has been a member of Uptown Opera since its beginning. He has had major roles in most of its productions, including “Barber of Seville,” “Marriage of Figaro” and “Sweeney Todd.” Newman also has performed with the Spokane Symphony, the Coeur d’Alene Summer Theater and Boise Opera.

Mezzo-soprano JoAnne Bouma will sing the role of Augusta, Tabor’s proud, straight-laced first wife. Bouma is well known in Spokane for her performances with the Spokane Symphony and the Northwest Bach Festival as well as for her roles in several Uptown Opera productions.

Karen Noble, director of Eastern Washington University’s opera program, will sing the role of Mama McCourt, Baby Doe’s mother.

The music will be conducted by Scott Rednour, who grew up in Usk and graduated from Whitworth College. Rednour is now an accompanist on the staff of the Manhattan School of Music in New York.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color photo

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: Uptown Opera’s “The Ballad of Baby Doe” will open at the Met on Friday at 8 p.m. Other shows (all at 8 p.m. except when noted) will be Saturday, Sunday (3 p.m.), Tuesday, Wednesday (7:30 p.m.) and May 30-31. Tickets are $14 to $26 ($9-$21 for children, students and seniors), available at G&B Select-a-Seat outlets or call (800) 325-SEAT.