The Ballad of Baby Doe (1956)
Moore/Latouche

Elizabeth “Baby” Doe was America’s 20th century Cinderella. She rose far above her station to find true love in Horace Tabor, a leading silver magnate and Lieutenant Governor of Colorado. Cinderella herself couldn’t have dreamed of a more luxurious, richer life. Cinderella’s story ends with happily ever after, but for Baby Doe, happily ever after was only the end of act one; what followed was a devastating fall from grace as she lost her fame and fortune. Maybe Baby Doe is more like Britney Spears, America’s pop princess whose rise and fall also made salacious tabloid fodder. Whatever comparison you make, Baby Doe’s story continues to intrigue, captured in song and dance by Douglas Moore and John Latouche.

Though the title character carries the show with five arias (!), the opera actually offers two meaty female roles. Horace’s first wife Augusta plays an important role in Baby Doe’s story, and it’s not the role of antagonist. In Act II, after Horace has divorced her, she tries to warn Baby Doe of an impending crash in the value of silver, but Horace keeps his faith in silver. Augusta is also pivotal musically: she has a show-stopping aria of her own along with a duet and a treble quintet. At the opera’s premiere, Lucius Beebe of the New York Herald Tribune wrote, “The evening was dominated by Augusta Tabor, played by Martha Lipton, and she carried it off in a very grand manner indeed.” Jerry McBride recalls that audiences at early performances sympathized strongly with Augusta – perhaps even sympathizing with her more than with Baby Doe.

Back to those five arias – Moore’s score balances “bulging romanticism” with “simple folksiness,” interpolating “Straussian vocal arches and leaps and sustained legatos” alongside traditional American tunes like “Oh, My Darling Clementine,” as Freddy Dominguez explained in his review for OperaWire. On the opera’s revival at New York City Opera in 1988, New York Times reviewer Will Crutchfield called the music an ingredient in the opera’s success, writing, “Unlike so many 20th-century operas, it contains music that is satisfying to sing – real vocal lines, not pitched speech-song.” That music is paired with an effective libretto, which Crutchfield described as “sturdy operatic dramaturgy. The tale is told in short, pointed scenes; everything is as simple and direct as it is in, say, ‘Pagliacci.’”

That simplicity doesn’t take anything away from the heart in Baby Doe’s story. Crutchfield says, “In Horace and Augusta Tabor and in Baby Doe we see failings and qualities that redeem feelings, roads not taken and deeds regretted. And we are moved by the large themes of fortunes made and lost, loyalty broken or kept. There are few who cannot identify directly with one or another of the characters at one or another stage in their histories.” Beyond the timelessness of a love story, it’s the world around Baby Doe, Horace, and Augusta that makes the opera even more pertinent today. Celebrity culture still has a grip on our society today, even if we’ve traded traditional press for social media. A debate over the future of the national currency feels particularly relevant in our digital age, with cryptocurrencies rocking the market, credit cards accessed by smartphones, and some economists calling for the end of the U.S. penny. Horace and Baby Doe’s future largely hangs on the success of presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, a demagogue populist who made the preservation of silver a priority of his campaign. In our politically divided climate, it feels as if our own futures hang in the balance of each presidential election.