'Giants in the Earth,' a Pulitzer Prize-winning opera by Long Island composer Douglas Moore, returns to the stage decades later

A Long Island composer’s opera — acclaimed after its debut but not performed in more than half a century — will return to the stage this spring.

The composer is Douglas Moore, who was born in Cutchogue in 1893 and died in Greenport in 1969, a Mayflower descendant whose ancestors had settled on the North Fork about 300 years prior. For much of his professional life, Moore summered in a cottage on family land off the Great Peconic Bay, working in a cabin that contained little more than a desk and a piano. He spent the rest of the year in cushier surroundings in Manhattan’s Morningside Heights, where he taught music at Columbia University and Barnard College.

He corresponded with Hungarian composer Bela Bartok, palled around with Cole Porter and is best remembered today for the opera "Ballad of Baby Doe," a tale of love and riches and loss in the Colorado silver boom. But the work he loved best — for which he won a 1951 Pulitzer Prize — was "Giants in the Earth," which the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra will perform April 26 and 27. Performances will be filmed for broadcast.

Miranda Beeson, a Cutchogue resident who sits on the board of the Douglas Moore Fund and whose father, composer Jack Beeson, was a friend and neighbor of Moore's, said Moore was a "proponent of American music written on American themes" who worked deliberately outside of the European tradition. "People are intimidated by the word ‘opera,’ but these were composers who were writing music that wasn’t intimidating at all. It’s so lyrical, so beautiful."

A tale of immigrants on the American plains

"Giants" is a story, sung in English, about early Norwegian immigrants who homesteaded on the Dakota Territory. Moore’s biographer, Jerry McBride, called it "very dark and tragic." Much of its action is set in a sod hut where husband and wife Per and Beret endure homesickness, a plague of locusts, Beret’s slide into insanity and their child’s life-threatening illness. The opera ends after Beret sends Per into a blizzard to look for a priest for the child and she and the audience realize he has frozen to death.

The ominous opening bars of a recording of a 1951 performance by the Columbia Opera Workshop suggest how vast and empty the Plains must have seemed to newcomers.

"Far as I can see, so wide, the prairie like an endless sea," sings Per's baritone. By the third act, the sound is high-pitched, frantic and claustrophobic. Beret's soprano becomes a howl.

"Giants" was only slightly less unlucky than its protagonists, drawing poor or mixed reviews from The New York Times, Time and Newsweek before the Pulitzer Committee declared that "In no opera by an American is there music of such freshness, beauty and distinctive character." The prize brought Moore $500 but did no good for his opera: a copyright dispute kept it out of production, and by 1953, when that dispute was resolved, "the public’s memory of the Pulitzer had faded," McBride wrote. The next and only other fully staged performance was in 1974, by the University of South Dakota.

Decades later, Delta David Gier, South Dakota Symphony music director, contacted Moore’s former publisher, hoping to stage the work in time for the centenary of publication of the novel that provided Moore’s source material.

"They sent a huge box of manuscript scores that had laid in their warehouse in Pennsylvania for decades," Gier said. "It was falling apart, but I was able to see what was there, to ascertain that it was in fact a really fabulous opera that needed to be revived, rerecorded, needed to be out there so other opera companies of the world could consider it."

Gier found additional material in Moore’s papers, preserved in Columbia University’s archives. These are prodigious, consisting of notes and scores for seven operas, songs, orchestral and chamber music and two books on music.

Gier said that Moore’s operas held up well.

"Moore had a keen dramatic sense, a gift for setting language to music. We have these stories from him — getting a libretto to an opera and for weeks at a time pacing around his house, reciting out loud, finding the rhythms and melodic contour of the text ... It’s so natural the way he does it, it’s not like an instrumental composer trying to fit words into the music he’s composed."

Fall into opera obscurity

Why did Moore fall into relative obscurity when contemporaries like Aaron Copland remain household names? Moore's style was "tonal, conservative," drawing inspiration from older songs and 19th-century composers at a time when his peers wrote more dissonant compositions or "incorporated more modern elements" in their work, McBride wrote in an email, adding that musicologists favored the new. 

The marketplace was also a factor.

"American audiences tended to prefer instrumental music over operas at the time he was composing his mature works," McBride wrote.

The economics of opera continue to programming choices, stage director Jay Lesenger said. "Opera companies, especially in recent years, unless they’re bigger companies with a lot of money, are reluctant to program" shows that may be important but are not proven classics, he said. "Carmen, Rigoletto — a lot of people are going to see those."

A fully staged "Giants" would cost about $1 million, Gier said. His symphony’s semi-staged version, with costumes but stripped down sets, will cost about half that.

According to the Moore Fund, created to promote opera as an American art form with particular attention to Moore’s work, just 8% of operas produced since the 1990s have been mid-century operas and musicals, though common themes of work from that era — financial instability, challenges to political authority and racial inequality — still resonate.

Moore's Long Island roots

On Long Island, most traces of Moore and his work have vanished. Summer concerts once held in his honor on the Cutchogue village green haven’t been held for about a decade, said Mark MacNish, executive director of the Cutchogue-New Suffolk Historical Council, partly because many people with direct ties to Moore no longer live in the area.

"There’s been huge turnover out here since COVID," MacNish said. "A lot of the older generation’s gone — passed, or some have moved away."

There is still a Moores Lane in Cutchogue that cuts from Main Road south through the North Fork Country Club, its greens carved from land once owned by Moore's father. Quawksnest, the home where Moore grew up, still stands, but the cabin where he composed no longer stands. Salt Meadow, the summer cottage he occupied as an adult, was razed and replaced by a roughly 9,000-square foot modernist mansion.

Few Long Islanders alive knew Moore, his wife or their two daughters. Beeson recalled they bought multiple copies of the Sunday Times so everyone could have their own crossword puzzle, and a parlor game whose competition involved composing, on the fly, the last line of an imaginary novel in a given author's voice.

Moore's grandniece, Barbara Butterworth, a former teacher and school administrator from Cutchogue, recalled a "tall and stately" man who drove the neighborhood children each morning in a Willys Jeep to a nearby farm to pick up the day’s milk.

Every morning he walked to the cabin on the edge of the creek that ran behind his house. He came home for lunch and went back in the afternoon.

"Sometimes I would stop by" after crabbing, she said. "He’d be at the piano, pen in one hand, with the score there as he played around and wrote things down."

The visits were brief. "I don’t think he was super-keen on it," she said. "He didn’t like to be interrupted."