Dear 'Ballad of Baby Doe': a love letter

If The Ballad of Baby Doe were in Italian, it would easily be considered one of the greatest operas of all time.

Unfortunately for its sake, it's in English, American, and considered overly sentimental, sappy, and  dramatic (which actually describes most of Puccini as well, lol).

The Ballad of Baby Doe is based on the real life rags to riches and back to rags again of Elizabeth "Baby Doe" Tabor and her romance with Horace Tabor, as well as their failing marriages before they find peace and love in each other. It is a very real and human look at complicated people with complicated emotions making complicated mistakes. It's not about faeries, or Greek myths, or great kings and queens of the past, it's about two very real people who loved each other very much.  Even though this is very obviously a dramatized version of the events,  it feels very real.

The Ballad of Baby Doe has some of the most beautiful music and arias in all of the opera canon; even the recitative is to die for. Act 1, Scene 4 with the "of course, of course, dear Mister Mulligan" is a great example of that. A simple line to a bellhop has no business being that gorgeous. The whole opera is filled with these magnificent little kernels of music that you want to just replay those 5-10 seconds over and over and over. I think the sweeping mid-century Americana scratches an itch in my brain; everything about it seems so familiar and cozy. I laugh at those who try to insinuate that this music is easy to sing when it's full of tricky intervals, complicated passages, and genuinely demanding material. I know that the score for "Willow Song" isn't really meant to have a huge D6 sustained after being pulled from thing air--which is a standard set by Beverly Sills,  but you're not trying to tell me that's easy! 

This opera is certainly one of those pieces I would call a "star vehicle," because if your three leads are no good, or no good together, the whole thing falls apart. The whole crux of the believability of the opera is you liking and rooting for Baby Doe from the start, and having sympathy and empathy with not only her and Horace, but Horace's wife, Augusta. Not only does the role of Baby Doe have to be sung to perfection, not only do have to take an emotional journey of being a young woman who falls in love with a significantly older man and make that both believable and  something you root for, but you have to take it all the way to the end of the opera and face  the realities of love and mortality.  All of that has to start with you liking her and rooting for her in the beginning, especially since you are presented with this figure that you find out other women don't like and are envious of. Baby Doe has to be likable. The audience has to love her, and they have to fall in love with her as Tabor does.

The opera is clumsy and flawed in places, but so are both the three leading characters as well as so many other operas that seem to have withstood the test of the time much better. (The second act of La Traviata is legitimately unbearable to me, for example--and that that plays everywhere, all of the time, and is considered the "greatest," or... whatever. lol.)

Unfortunately, there are not many recordings of this opera. There are a few clips of a filmed version that was on television from Omnibus on YouTube. The full cast recording was very graciously uploaded on YouTube recently in full by a user, because there is no version of the full cast recording on any streaming service. There are no filmed versions from the Met. I am sure that it not being in public domain as so many other operas are may have something to do with it, but I am surprised that Opera Vision doesn't have it, either. But what we do have of performances are treasured.

One of my favourite scenes in the whole opera I have above there, from the end of "lovely evening" to the end of the Act 1, Scene 2. Horace Tabor overhears saloon girls nastily whispering about Baby Doe, learning the name of the woman he had met earlier. He hears her singing what he thinks it just a beautiful song, but, in reality, she sings it about her failed marriage with drunken Harvey Doe. Horace overhears her singing, and in that moment he falls in love with her. He then tells her that she makes him feel in a way he forgot he knew how to feel.

He listens in on her singing about her failed love, and he in that moment falls in love with her.

One could only hope for something so magical.

Below are two more performances of Willow Song by Sills.

The Ballad of Baby Doe is a story of three people who are deeply flawed, a profoundly human story about love, death, and sacrifice, where complicated people with complicated emotions make complicated mistakes, asking the difficult questions about what love really is and is it really worth it.

But like.... COME ONNNNNNNNN 😭💕