This Day in Classical Music History (Welles Helms Copland Opera for Students)

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.