Review: ‘The Ballad of Baby Doe’ opens Central City Opera season

The story of Horace and Baby Doe Tabor is Colorado’s own legend. Its aspects of folklore made it an ideal subject for operatic treatment. Its sweeping narrative, however, is just complex enough to betray that it is, in fact, based on real life events.

“The Ballad of Baby Doe” by composer Douglas Moore and librettist John Latouche was premiered at the Central City Opera House in 1956 and later entered the standard operatic repertory after its New York premiere in 1958. Giving birth to “Colorado’s Opera” has always been a point of pride for CCO and its jewel box theater, and the company revives it regularly.

Saturday night, a new production marking the opera’s 60th anniversary opened the 2016 Central City season. Its deft handling of the opera’s epic scope, which covers events traversing the last twenty years of the 19th Century, is made possible by technologies common enough today, but in their infancy in 1956.

One of “Baby Doe’s” difficulties is its frequent changes of scene. Director Ken Cazan beautifully handles much of this with backdrop projections using actual photographic images of the Leadville locales where the Tabors’ story unfolded.

Particularly imaginative is the use of hanging scrims where photographs of the three principals, silver magnate Horace Tabor, his second wife Elizabeth “Baby Doe” McCourt Tabor, and his first wife Augusta Pierce Tabor, are projected at strategic psychological points.

In only a few respects, mainly for dramatic effect, did Moore and Latouche depart from actual events, and these are relatively minor. A turning point in the drama is the presidential election of 1896, whose role in events is exaggerated. Augusta Tabor, who actually died in 1895, is seen after that election in a scene with important narrative impact.

Latouche was careful not to let the unavoidable, but abstruse particulars of late 19th-century bimetal monetary standards, the most heated political issue of the time, overwhelm the intimate love triangle at the heart of the drama.

While Latouche’s libretto is a masterclass in the adaptation of historical events, the grandeur of Moore’s score has given the opera staying power. The titular heroine is given a generous helping of five arias, and all are exceedingly beautiful.

Soprano Anna Christy, seen on the Central City stage most recently as Susanna in 2014’s “The Marriage of Figaro,” made an immediate impact with the first of them, the “Willow Song,’ and this continued through the famous “Letter Aria,” “Gold is a Fine Thing,” and the final “Always Through the Changing.” Christy’s sparkling coloratura is as lustrous as silver, the metal on whose fortunes the Tabors’ lives revolve.

Mezzo-soprano Susanne Mentzer is an imposing, but dignified Augusta. It would have been easy for Moore and Latouche to write the character out of Act II, after Horace leaves her for Baby Doe, but thankfully they did not. Mentzer makes the most out of her final scenes, where she rejects help for the now-destitute Horace and where she, as an apparition, guides him through the review of his life before he dies penniless. Yet her Act I numbers, particularly the office scene where she confirms the affair, do not lose in impact either.

Nonetheless, it really is baritone Grant Youngblood who holds the narrative together with his heroic, deeply sympathetic portrayal of Horace. Despite the mystique of the heroine, Horace really is the central character. His most famous aria, “Warm as the Autumn Light,” was sung with such heartfelt devotion by Youngblood that it was easy to forgive the character’s numerous transgressions. His final scene at the Tabor Grand Theatre is also a tour de force.

In supporting roles, distinguished CU alumna Sarah Barber, whose rich low mezzo finally makes its way to the CCO stage, is predictably wonderful as Baby Doe’s mother. Baritone Donald Hartmann stands out in the generous cameo appearance of 1896 presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan.

Much of the opera’s lifeblood lies in its chorus, masterfully prepared by Aaron Breid, and that includes the prominent quartets of Tabor’s cronies and Augusta’s friends. Conductor Timothy Myers leads the always superb CCO orchestra through Moore’s colorful tapestry.

While Cazan’s transition between Horace’s death and Baby Doe’s apotheosis—in which we are supposed to imagine the scene transitioning from the theatre to the shack at the Matchless Mine where Baby spent her last years — is haunting, it is also a bit obscure. The projections include actual images of Baby’s copious writings at the cabin.

The always-raucous opening night crowd at CCO responded with respectful exuberance to the revelatory anniversary production.