Opera on the farm

On June 18th, 1993, host Charles Kuralt, along with Eugenia Zukerman took Sunday Morning to an unusual place for a performance not often seen or heard. Our Sunday Best: 20 Years of Sunday Morning brings back that moment, as a Sunday Morning classic.

KURALT: Opera. Just say the word and glittering halls come to mind: La Scala or The Met, and the gentlemen in black tie and elegant ladies bejeweled and a velvet curtain rising. Well, Eugenia Zukerman is about to take us to a different but no less inspiring setting and to a different but no less appreciative audience. This is opera on the farm.

(Footage from a farm and from the opera, The Tender Land)

VERN SUTTON, Director: (Voiceover) I love creating theater in
unexpected places.

(Footage of Sutton)

SUTTON: I've always liked finding drama where you usually don't
expect to find it.

(Footage from the opera, The Tender Land)

MURRAY SIDLIN: (Conductor) (Voiceover) When we come out to rural communities and present an opera and 1,700 people are hearing an opera for the first time...

(Footage of Sidlin)

SIDLIN: ...and they stand and applaud and cheer and cry and laugh all in the right places, something is right. Something is very right.

(Footage from rehearsal)

SIDLIN: Let's try it one more time. This is at number four, everybody. Five...

EUGENIA ZUKERMAN: (Voiceover) Something was very right and unique when conductor Murray Sidlin and director Vern Sutton of the University of Minnesota School of Music presented Aaron Copland's rarely performed opera The Tender Land.

(Footage from a farm)

ZUKERMAN: (Voiceover) This summer, The Tender Land toured working farms in Minnesota and the Dakotas. Farmhouses were the sets, the land and sky the backdrops.

(Footage from the opera, The Tender Land)

ZUKERMAN: (Voiceover) Local farmers and townspeople were cast in the chorus. The tour brought The Tender Land as close, perhaps, as it will ever come to Copland's original intent.

(Footage from the opera, The Tender Land and of Zukerman)

ZUKERMAN: Aaron Copland did not want The Tender Land to be a big operatic production. He wanted it to tell a simple story and to have a simple musical style. He wanted it also to be easy to perform and easy to stage.

(Footage from the opera, The Tender Land)

ELIZABETH COLLINS SMITH (Performer): (Voiceover) Imagination is no longer an issue. You don't have to create the set inside your head.

ZUKERMAN: (Voiceover) Elizabeth Collins Smith plays Lori, a young farm girl on the eve of her high school graduation.

(Footage of Smith)

SMITH: It's just all right here, and you can really count on the audience's imagination to be there, too, because really it's their own reality. (Footage from the opera, The Tender Land)

ZUKERMAN: (Voiceover) Set in the 1930s, The Tender Land is the story of a farm familand the choices they face. Caught between her fear of isolation and her love of the land, Lori decides to leave home, a choice her mother did not make when she was young.

(Footage from the opera, The Tender Land)

LOU SCHAFER (Farmer): Well, it brought tears to my eyes... (Footage of Lou Schafer)

SCHAFER: ... several times through.
(Footage from the opera, The Tender Land)

ZUKERMAN: (Voiceover) Lou Schafer owns the Minnesota farm at Red Lakes Falls where The Tender Land tour stopped for a night, a chilly, rainy night that would have kept a less hearty audience indoors.

(Footage from the opera, The Tender Land)

SCHAFER: (Voiceover) It's all things that--that I've seen myself or seen other people go through.

(Footage of Schafer)

SCHAFER: So in many ways, it's been the life that I've lived and others around here.

(Footage of Zukerman and George French)

GEORGE FRENCH (Director, Musical Theater): I was really amazed at the number of people. We must have got 1,200, 1,300 people. The weather conditions were just barely adequate, really, for this type of... (Footage from the opera, The Tender Land)

ZUKERMAN: (Voiceover) George French is the director of musical theater at the nearby branch of the University of Minnesota.

FRENCH: (Voiceover) We've been planning this event for close to a year. And it basically had been raining the entire day, and we were on the verge of just deciding that it was going to be at the high school. We decided to give it one more shot and come back out to the farm, and then as soon as we filled up the bleachers with well over 1,000 people, we realized that we were committed.

(Footage of Zukerman and French)

FRENCH: This was going on at the farm, rain or shine or whatever. (Footage from the opera, The Tender Land)

SIDLIN: (Voiceover) We've added some entertainment, as is often the case in a celebration, in opera.

ZUKERMAN: (Voiceover) Conductor Murray Sidlin. (Footage of Zukerman and Sidlin)

SIDLIN: So there are some old American folk songs that Copland had set, and we add those to the celebration, and one of them is At The River, this wonderful revivalist hymn that is just so beautiful.

(Footage of a river; from the opera, The Tender Land)

VIVIAN PERLIS (Musical Historian): (Voiceover) Aaron Copland would have been absolutely thrilled at the kind of production that's going on now of The Tender Land.

ZUKERMAN: (Voiceover) Musical historian and Copland biographer Vivian Perlis.

(Footage of Zukerman and Perlis)

PERLIS: He did care a great deal about reaching people. Whatever person, whatever part of the population he was aiming toward in his music, he cared a great deal.

(Footage ftom the opera, The Tender Land)

SIDLIN: (Voiceover) I still think that Aaron Copland is sort of the best that we have...

(Footage of Sidlin)

SIDLIN: ... in terms of a composer who best illuminates the Americn spirit in music.

(Footage from the opera, The Tender Land)

SIDLIN: (Voiceover) And I thought that this opera and that philosophy belongs out in a lot of rural areas.

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