Opera in Texas

Last week students, businessmen, ranchers and punchers from all over north Texas poured into the little town of Denton to hear the first opera that ever got its world premiere in the Lone Star State. What they heard was not musical history in the making but local history in the remaking; and they loved it. Composed by Julia Smith, a hometown girl made good (via Manhattan's Juilliard School of Music), Cynthia Parker incorporated Indian dance-tunes, frontier songs like Lost My Pardner and Chicken Reel, as well as some lovely home-made music.

The opera told a story from the 1830s which many of the audience had heard on their grandfathers' knees. Its heroine was a real Texan (played by Texas-born Leonora Corona, more famous for buxom beauty than for bravura) who was kidnapped as a child by the Comanches. When her brother found her, years later, and got the vocal Texas Rangers to restore her and her daughter, Prairie Flower, to civilization, she pined and pined. She liked to think of herself as a Comanche, not a paleface. One day her son Quanah came in to rescue her, and in the melee she was accidentally and mortally wounded. When Quanah sang his deep-throated lament over her body, even the stanchest cowhands in the audience had to blow their noses.

Most moved of all was an 82-year-old lady named Bianca Babb Bell, for the operatic tintype might have come straight from her family album. One day back in 1866, when she was 9, some redskins swooped down on her home, shot her mother dead with arrows right before her eyes, carried her and her small brother off and held them captive for two years. The superstitious Indians blackened her blonde curls with buffalo tallow and soot. In the end her father rescued her not by raid, but by ransom--money, horses, blankets, saddles, calico, beads. She still thinks the price was a bit steep for one so young.

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