DOUGLAS MOORE (18931969) is best known for his most successful opera, The
Ballad of Baby Doe. Inspired by actual events that occurred in 19th century
Colorado, that opera launched the operatic career of American soprano Beverly
Sills. Moore was already in his sixties when he wrote Baby Doe, but for
three decades he had played a significant role in American musical life. And he
served on the music faculty at Columbia University beginning in 1926, and as
chairman of the music department from 1940 until 1962.
Moore, born in a Long Island suburb
of New York, studied composition at Yale University with Horatio Parker, the
founder of Yales music department and an American operatic composer in his
own right. After graduation, Moore served as a lieutenant in the United States
Navy, an experience that provided him new material sources for, and insights
into, popular songwritingan area that had already sparked his interest during
his years at Yale. This new parameter manifested itself in a collection of wryly
humorous pieces, The Songs My Mother Never Taught Me (1921), written
in collaboration with folksinger John Jacob Niles.
In 1919 Moore went to Paris to
study with two disciples of the celebrated Belgian composer Csar Franck: Vincent
dIndy for composition, and the mystic Charles Tournemire for organ. On his
return to the United States he studied for a while with Ernest Bloch, and then
returned to Paris to study with Nadia Boulanger. But he remained more interested
in Americana, popular operetta styles, and dance tunes than in cultivated contemporary
musical developments. That tendency found its echo in works such as his orchestral
suite The Pageant of P. T. Barnum (1924) and the symphonic poem Moby
Dick (1928).
Moore was drawn to theaterfirst
with incidental music and then moving to stage works. Together with Stephen
Vincent Binet, he wrote a school operetta, The Headless Horseman (1936),
based on Washington Irvings The Legend of Sleepy Hollow; and a folk
opera, The Devil and Daniel Webster (1938), which Stravinsky is said
to have studied while composing The Rakes Progress. After the Second
World War, Moore moved toward more ambitious full-scale operatic projects with
the tragic Giants in the Earth (1951), on a story by Ole Edvart Rolvaag,
set among Norwegian immigrants in the Dakota Territorya work that won a Pulitzer
Prize. Both with Giants and Baby Doe, Moore gained a reputation
as a musical chronicler of the recent American past.