In 1954 Aaron Copland, one of the darlings of 20th Century American music, created an opera that was damned with faint praise. Everything else Copland touched seemed to turn to gold. So was it a bad opera, or was it just bad timing?
The 1950s turned out to be a tricky time for Aaron Copland, the master of Americana, to create his first major opera. In a period of mass-neuroses typified by Senator McCarthy’s Communist witch-hunts, Copland found himself less sure of his standing as a darling of the music world.
