April 21, 1937—He was barely older than those he was
directing, and his fervid imagination was already turning to a new project, but
21-year-old Orson Welles’ overseeing
of Aaron Copland’s opera for
high-school students, The Second
Hurricane, represented not just a curiosity in two important lives ("Aaron and Orson Go to Glee!"), but
also a blueprint for a grander artistic design.
Lehman Engle, conductor of the Henry Street
Settlement Music School, enlisted Copland (pictured) to write an opera for the school. The composer already had much on his plate—an
orchestra piece commissioned by CBS that he wanted desperately to complete—but
he plugged away anyway, in “all-consuming fashion,” as he recalled years later.
By this point in his career, Copland—even then, the leader of a group of composers trying to create an authentic American
classical music—was very much on board with the project. According to his
memoir, Copland—1900 Through 1942, his
motives were “not all unselfish":
“The usual run of symphony audiences submitted to
new music when it was played at them,
but never showed signs of really wanting it. The atmosphere had become deadening.
It was anything but conducive to the creation of new works. Yet the composer must compose! A school opera seemed a good momentary solution for one composer, at any rate."
In the Thirties and Forties, Copland was hunting for ways
to expand the reach of classical music beyond its normal audience. His musical
criticism provided one means of doing so; ballet and films (notably, in Billy the Kid and The Red Pony, respectively) another; and musical theater, in the
form of opera, yet another. It would take another 15 years before he set to
work seriously on his only other work in the latter format, The Tender Land.
In youngsters, the composer saw more than a
potential new audience for classical music: he glimpsed a level of burgeoning
technical skill that made feasible his hope of a relatively sophisticated
production. It was through school music organizations springing up across the
country, giving rise to “tales of creditable performances with charming fresh
voices and good orchestral techniques.” In this kind of environment, he felt
comfortable introducing what would become an indispensable element of
Americana into his work: in this case, a colonial-era folk tune, “The Capture
of Burgoyne.”
For his librettist, Copland chose his friend Edwin Denby. The dance critic-poet
contributed in many ways to the show, including coming up with the plot, urging
that “all stage business was to be simple and natural”—and recommending that
Welles, “the most talented person in town,” be hired as director. There was one
thing he was not particularly good at, though: Science 101. It might have
seemed a good idea to set a play about Middle American kids cooperating in the
face of natural disaster in the Midwest, home of populism—except that the particular natural disaster could,most assuredly, not be a hurricane, since these are tropical storms that
stay close to the coast. (For something as inland as the Midland, “tornado” or “twister”
would have worked better.)
In Copland’s memoir, Denby sounds slightly sheepish
about his mistake. If anyone ever heard of a similar odor of embarrassment
emanating from Welles, nobody breathed a word about it. These were his glory
years, when he communicated confidence and charisma. He might not be the most
punctual theater professional, but when he walked into rehearsals he was all
intelligence, decision and movement, the way he was before age, weight and
mounting career disappointment slowed him down.
Welles helped Copland choose the cast and nixed one
of Denby’s less-inspired notions—a ballet pantomime in which the children
imagine what rescue work is like. Already, however, he had plunged into
something far more titanic in scale and publicity value: Marc Blitzstein’s agitprop
musical The Cradle Will Rock, a forerunner of the culture war battles fought a half-century later over government funding of projects loathed by conservatives. With
that show set to premiere only two months after Copland’s, Welles passed along
his instructions on how to stage the high-school “play opera” to his
associate, Hiram “Chubby” Sherman, who followed it faithfully.
A high-society crowd trooped downtown for the show’s
premiere. Only one cast member was paid: Joseph Cotten, Welles’ friend and
keystone in his Mercury Theater troupe, was given the grand sum of $10. Other
cast members got their foot in the door of their profession in this production,
notably Arthur Andersen (the real-life inspiration for Zac Efron’s youthful
character in Me and Orson Welles) and
William Alland (later, a reporter in Citizen
Kane).
The anonymous New
York Times critic, while praising Welles’ direction and the youthful cast
members’ singing, was harder on Copland, complaining about his “lack of melodic
inspiration [and] … constant repetition of empty, dry phrases.”
But the show was
hardly a complete loss: Three years later, another wunderkind, Leonard Bernstein, would direct the opera at the Peabody
Playhouse in Boston, and in 1960—by this time, a titan of the musical theater,
not to mention an enormous media presence with his musical broadcasts for young people—he drew
fresh attention to the show with a TV production.
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