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By Harlie Sponaugle

INTRODUCTION

During the 1940s and ‘50s, Columbia University, largely through its Music Department’s Opera Workshop, served as an incubator and proving ground for new American opera, presenting 12 world premieres and numerous other productions of noteworthy American works. “In its flourishing years, . . . the Opera Workshop made a significant contribution to the cultural life of both campus and city, and served as an influential voice for new music.”1 With Douglas Moore’s guidance and inspiration, the Workshop became the impetus for a new interest in the American lyric theater on the part of composers and audiences alike.

The era’s legacy encompasses both music and musicians. The works created there helped forge an American operatic idiom, and several are important staples of the current repertory. Others deserve to be re-examined and perhaps revived. The talented musicians who studied at the Workshop carried their experiences and knowledge with them into their professional careers, often recreating some aspects of their Workshop days.

Writing in July 1951, H. W. Heinsheimer referred to the “now famous Opera Workshop at Columbia University.”2 And yet in 1998, New York Times music critic Anthony Tommasini wrote that the Workshop’s “story has mostly been forgotten, though many of the operas generated at the time have secured places in the repertory.”3 A thorough search of the current literature (since 1985) turned up only three mentions of the Workshop: the article just quoted, and two pieces in Opera News.

The Workshop has been forgotten even by Columbia University’s own theater and music departments. In his article, Tommasini talks with George Steel, the recently appointed executive director of the Miller Theater, who admitted that he had been completely in the dark about what happened at Columbia during those years until Professor Jack Beeson “showed him the archives.”4 In reality, the materials at the University Archives and Columbiana Library are remarkably thin. The archives referred to in the Times article was actually a single, unpublished paper written by Professor Beeson as a “Boy Scout good turn. . . . Whenever anybody showed any interest in the topic, I’d give them a copy of the paper.”5

Those who know and love American opera owe a debt of gratitude to those with the fore-sight and daring to undertake this experiment. Those who hope to encourage and aid young talents on today’s operatic scene owe themselves a more careful look at what transpired.

THE ELEMENTS

Douglas Moore Photo courtesy of Claire Jones 1998.

In 1940, when composer Douglas Moore became Chairman of Columbia University’s Music Department and Alice M. Ditson made a generous bequest to the University for “the encouragement and aide of musicians,”6 one might have predicted great things were in store for American opera. In the same year, Brander Matthews Hall opened as a performance space for the Columbia Theater Associates (CTA), headed by Dr. Milton Smith, who became a willing collaborator in experimenting with small-scale opera productions in the small-scale facility. In 1943, the Music Department organized the Columbia Opera Workshop to create an on-going structure to support the Department’s emerging vision of promoting American lyric theater. By 1944, when the University named Willard Rhodes as the Workshop’s executive and musical director, and Otto Luening joined the Columbia faculty and became musical director of CTA, the experiment was in full swing, and in 1945, when Jack Beeson joined them as assistant conductor, the core team was in place.7

Ms. Elizabeth Mahaffey, current Secretary and long-time administrator of the Alice M. Ditson Fund, sketches a vibrant picture of the era, portraying the sense of excitement and the energy pulsing through the corridors. Recalling her days as Moore’s administrative assistant in the Music Department, Ms. Mahaffey remarked on the dichotomy between the Music Department’s small, ill-lit offices, on loan from the Journalism Department, and the “creative juices flowing at their peak”8 within the shabby walls. Gathering outside the Brander Matthews Hall for the latest eagerly anticipated world premiere opera production, students could see the lights in the small office on the 6th floor of the brownstone across the street on 117th, where Béla Bartók had labored away in a position created for him by the first Ditson Fund grant. The collaboration between the University and the Ditson Fund created a synergy that sparked a vigorous efflorescence of American opera.

The Talent and Enthusiasms

As chairman of the Music Department during the 1940s and 1950s, Douglas Moore “created the enthusiasm, the space and the funding to develop new opera at the University.”9 Moore came to Columbia via Barnard College, its sister institution, in 1926. In 1940, soon after the American Lyric Theater’s successful production of his opera The Devil and Daniel Webster, he was named chairman of the department. Immediately he teamed with Dr. Milton Smith, director of the CTA and the newly erected Brander Matthews Hall, to bring small operas to that stage. The first production, in 1941, was Paul Bunyan, written by English composer Benjamin Britten to a libretto by W. H. Auden. After that, Moore instituted a program of presenting an American opera each season, beginning with Ernst Bacon’s A Tree on the Plains in 1943. The League of Composers had commissioned the work with the idea that “indigenous opera had the best chance of development for the time being at least, in college and university circles.”10 It is a measure of Moore’s commitment to the path he had undertaken that he took a small role in the production, and to rave reviews.11

Otto Luening Photo courtesy of C.F. Peters Corp. 1993.

Writing for Opera News in 1945, Moore described his scheme for getting past the suspicion with which Americans – audiences, critics and producers alike – viewed American opera: “Apparently the only way that we can have successful American operas is to produce a few of them and encourage our talented composers to try their hand at it. . . . The American type of opera as it will finally be established on a successful basis may very well be quite different from the European grand opera of the last century. Opera as a form of entertainment is much too choice to be allowed to wither on the vine or to be confined to the scientifically washed air of the museum. . . . Opera at Columbia is small scale, experimental, and not a bit grand, but it is opera, it is American, and it is exciting because its concern is with the future.”12

In 1944, using an administrative ploy sometimes necessary for financial reasons, Moore approached Otto Luening with an offer to become chair of the music department at Barnard. Included in his responsibilities would be the post of Music Director of Opera Projects at Brander Matthews Hall. Luening, a composer whose background included directing operas and musicals and even a short stint as actor and stage manager, was reluctant to accept the post, since it came with a salary of $5,000, a reduction of $500 from his current position at Bennington College in Vermont. Moore invited Luening to his apartment overlooking the Hudson River to talk things over. There, Moore serenaded his guest with a selection of his ‘destroyer songs’ from his Navy days, and then the two shuffled through a few dance steps! Calling in reinforcements, Moore introduced Luening to his wife and daughters, who beguiled him with talk of the importance of American art in all its forms.13

Within days, Luening accepted the position, and even agreed to take a three-month leave of absence from his duties at Bennington to direct the next CTA production, Bernard Wagenaar’s Pieces of Eight. Moore took him directly to see Brander Matthews Hall, where he met Milton Smith, the curmudgeonly but thoroughly professional director of CTA. Smith launched into his critical assessment of the “lousy operettas” they had recently mounted and admonished Luening to keep the noisy, impertinent orchestra musicians out of the theater, where the pit was “two feet two small for comfort.”14 Despite this bristly first encounter, Luening and Smith forged a warm and mutually beneficial working relationship.

Jack Beeson Photo courtesy of ASCAP 2001.

Luening first encountered Jack Beeson in a coffee shop the week before Christmas in 1944.15 Beeson had just arrived in town to study composition with Béla Bartók,16 and they struck up a conversation about the virtues of opera. Beeson already knew Moore, and offered to help out in the theater. Luening accepted the offer with relief, for he was becoming overwhelmed with the difficulties of recruiting players and arranging rehearsals during wartime. At the same time, Dr. Virginia Gildersleeve, Dean of Barnard College, must have learned of Luening’s trials, for she discovered $500 in discretionary funds which she offered to him to use as he saw fit. He used half to pay debts, and the other half to engage Beeson as assistant conductor of the Workshop, thus beginning a long professional and personal relationship.17

As assistant conductor and principal coach, Beeson was responsible for much of the preparation of the singers for the productions. He was the sole coach from January 1945 until the spring of 1948, when he left for two years in Rome after winning the Prix de Rome and a Fulbright Fellowship. When he returned, he split conducting and coaching responsibilities with Albert Rivett and John Kander. By 1954, when the Workshop produced his opera Hello Out There, he was no longer directly involved, but still worked with the cast because “it was my piece and I like coaching singers – I define singers as being just like other people, but more so.”18 Over the years, Professor Beeson has been the chief historian and spokesperson of the Workshop, taking the time in 1961 to document its administrative structure and detail its productions, because, as he says, “I just thought somebody might be interested some day, and while I was around and had access to the materials, and had been so involved and had had such a worthwhile experience, I thought I should write it down.”19

The Alice M. Ditson Fund

Douglas Moore at the piano. Photo courtesy of Opera News, July 1996.

Just after Douglas Moore was named chair of the Music Department, Yale, his alma mater, tried to lure him back by offering a deanship. When Nicholas Butler, President of Columbia University, caught wind of this, he let Moore in on a little tidbit he felt sure would keep him glued to the spot: the University was expecting a large legacy from Alice M. Ditson, widow of the publisher Charles Ditson, designated specifically for the support and encouragement of musicians, composers in particular. Moore stayed on at Columbia and was named to the fund’s advisory committee. He quickly “engineered the resignations of the self-interested members of the advisory committee . . . and their replacement by others more likely to carry out the implications of the will.”20

As Permanent Secretary of the Fund, Moore established a policy of an annual commission for a new American opera. In the ten academic years from 1942 through 1952, the Fund was responsible for creating nine new operas (including one year in which a competition was substituted for the commission), although two of these works were never produced at Columbia (or anywhere else, as far as the author can ascertain). In the years from 1941–1959, when not producing one of its commissions, the Ditson Fund helped finance the production of an American opera from some other source, including works by Luening, Moore and Beeson. (Refer to the Appendix, Table I, for a list of the commissions during this period, and Table II for a complete list of American operas produced.)

Although Moore was committed to building an American operatic tradition, the Ditson Fund served music in many other ways during this period. The first grant went to create a sinecure for Béla Bartók beginning in January 1941, when both his health and his finances were failing, and a later grant supported the publication of his Serbo-Croatian Folk Songs in 1942. A grant from the Ditson Fund initiated the Columbia University Press Music imprint. Through almost annual grants, the Ditson Fund supported the American Music Center (AMC), founded in 1939 by Otto Luening and other leading composers, performers, publishers and educators, to serve as a clearinghouse for musical scores and other hard to obtain information about contemporary American music, and to promote its performance and distribution and throughout the Western Hemisphere.

Using a Ditson Fund grant, Moore and Luening founded the American Recording Society, which went on to become Composers Recording Inc., which has released the initial recordings of the works of hundreds of American composers. In 1943-44, the fund awarded thirteen (13) Post-War Fellowships of $1,200 each to composers and conductors to help them resume their musical careers after they left the armed services. Recipients of the Fund’s annual $1,000 Conductor’s Award during this period include Leopold Stokowski (1952), Robert Shaw (1955), Howard Mitchell (1957), Leonard Bernstein (1958), and Julius Rudel (1959).21

Brander Matthews Hall

Brander Matthews Hall Courtesy of Alice M. Ditson Fund, Department of Music, Columbia University. From Monroe, Mary, curator. Music at Columbia: The First 100 Years, A Celebration of the Centennial of the Department of Music, Founded 1896, 2000.

The planners of Brander Matthews Hall had a specific vision for their theater: a small auditorium where students could gain the maximum theatrical experience by playing to a small audience numerous times, instead of to a large audience once or twice, and which would be at least “partially experimental.”22 Seating was limited to 29823, since any number over 300 would require compliance with fire codes that would add considerable expense to the building costs. The auditorium’s hard wooden seats were arranged in fifteen rows, with the furthest only 43 feet from the pit.

Plans for the Hall included an overly large backstage area that could be partitioned off and used for building sets, but the orchestra pit was woefully inadequate. When opera productions called for a larger orchestra than would fit in the available space in the pit, the space designed for storing sets was pressed into service for seating the additional players.24

Go to Part II

See also Appendix Table I and Table II - "Works Commissioned/Sponsored by the Ditson Fund" and "American Opera at Columbia University: 1941–1959"

Bibliography

FOOTNOTES - Part I
1. Mary Monroe, curator, Music at Columbia: The First 100 Years, a Celebration of the Centennial of the Department of Music, Founded 1896 (New York: by Columbia University Department of Music, 2000), 26.
2. H. W. Heinsheimer, "Opera in America Today," Music Quarterly 37, no. 3 (July 1951): 321.
3. Anthony Tommasini, "Reclaiming a Rich History of New Opera," New York Times, 8 November 1998, 36.
4. Ibid.
5. Jack Beeson (Interview by author. Tape recording of phone conversation. Arlington, VA: October 29, 2001).
6. Beeson and Mahaffey, Activities.
7. The achievements of the era were possible only through the collaboration of all these organizations. The Workshop provided the continuity required to maintain the flow of performances by supplying a core of talented singers for the chorus and small parts, and frequently for the major roles. Perhaps because of the complex organization behind the productions and the Workshop’s steady involvement, the press and other writers often refer to any Columbia University opera production of the era as a Workshop production. When it serves to clarify the writing without misrepresenting the facts, this author follows the same practice. The specific organizations involved in each production are clearly delineated in Appendix II.
8. Elizabeth Mahaffey (Interview by author with Secretary to the Advisory Committee, Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University. Phone conversation. Arlington, VA, October 29, 2001).
9. Fred Knubel, American Opera Tradition to Be Celebrated in Concert at Columbia April 6 (March 25, 1997), Press release. Columbia University Office of Public Information, Columbia University, New York.
10. Olin Downes, "Bacon's 'a Tree on the Plains' to Have New York Premiere This Week," New York Times, 2 May 1941, sec. II, p. 5
11. Olin Downes, "Ernst Bacon Work Is Presented Here," New York Times, 6 May 1941, 24.
12. Douglas Moore, "Opera Productions at Columbia University," Opera News 9, no. 24 (April 16, 1945): 13.
13. Otto Luening, Odyssey of an American Composer: The Autobiography of Otto Luening (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1980), 446.
14. Ibid., 449.
15. Beeson, "Interview."
16. Bartók consistently refused to teach composition on the grounds that it could not be taught. Characteristically, Beeson convinced him to make an exception in his case. (Justin Davidson, "Taking Another Whack at 'Lizzie'." Newsday, February 28, 1999, sec. D, p 19.)
17. Luening, 256.
18. Beeson, "Interview."
19. Ibid.
20. Jack Beeson, "Da Ponte, Mac Dowell, Moore, and Lang: Four Biographical Essays," COLUMBIA Magazine (Summer 2000): 33.
21. Beeson and Mahaffey, Activities. All of the facts and figures in this section were drawn from this report.
22. Milton Smith, "Brander Matthews Hall," Columbia University Quarterly 32, no. 3 (October 1940, reprint).
23. Ibid. This number is taken from the Smith article. It is variously reported as 299 (Moore, 12), 290 (Steven Cerf, "Pioneers on Morningside Heights," Opera News 56, no. 1 (July 1991): 23), 296 (Joel Honig, "Is It Curtains for American Chamber Opera?," Opera News 62, no. 2 (August 1997): 13), and 280 (Tommasini, 36).
24. Beeson, "Interview."