Frontier Figures

by Beth E. Levy

  The solitary brave who graces the title page of Cadman's popular op. 45 plays on a similar ambiguity of associations (see figure 4).17 He represents a vision of Native America that was stylized and open to interpretation. Sun and moon merge in the lover's night/dawn song. The human figure itself melts into the natural surroundings: Where do his leggings meet the surrounding grass? Which is his thigh and which is the ground on which he sits? Most important of all, who is this Indian? Perhaps it is the lover who fails to woo the maid from the “Land of Sky-blue Water.” Perhaps it is the first-person narrator of Cadman's third song (“Far Off I Hear a Lover's Flute”), who cries out: “Why do I hate the crying flute / Which happy lovers play? / Ah! far and white my loved one walks / Along the Spirit Way!” In either case, the Indian is bereft—robbed by conflict, migration, or death—with no potential for romantic union or procreation. In this sense, the cold racial logic of “The Moon Drops Low” seems merely to exaggerate the lover's frustration; both point toward extinction.

  EXAMPLE 12. “The Moon Drops Low,” mm. 29–40

  CADMAN, LA FLESCHE, AND DAOMA

  The highlighting of song in Cadman's lecture recital reflects his aesthetic priorities, as well as the input of tenor Paul Kennedy Harper, Cadman's first important singer-collaborator. Harper was the most visible, but he was not the only contributor to the Indian Music Talk. Working behind the scenes were Fletcher and La Flesche. Indeed it was in preparation for his talk that Cadman first asked to meet them face-to-face, calling on them when he passed through Washington, DC, in mid-August 1908. Impressed by the composer's songs and his plans for the upcoming lecture tour, La Flesche returned the visit in late November, when his travels brought him to Pittsburgh. Not long afterward, he suggested that Cadman and Eberhart create an opera based on his adaptation of a Sioux legend. They accepted at once. For Eberhart, the project represented an extension of the dramatic, even melodramatic “scenes” that she readily sketched when Cadman asked her for a song text or a prefatory lyric; for Cadman, it was a chance to join his trademark Indian material and his lifelong ambition: grand opera. For all three, the project involved an unusually close collaboration, well documented in correspondence that extended from the time La Flesche completed the scenario in March 1909, through the summer months when Eberhart was working on the libretto, and well into 1910–12, while Cadman wrote and revised the score.

  FIGURE 4. The cover of the sheet music for Cadman's Four American Indian Songs, op. 45 (Boston: White-Smith, 1909)

  Although it is not clear whether Cadman knew it at the time, Indian operas were in the air when he sat down to write the ill-fated opera Daoma, later called The Land of the Misty Water, revised as Ramala, and never performed. In fact, Pittsburgh was the unlikely leading edge of a wave of Indian operas, beginning with Arthur Nevin's Poia (given a concert performance in Pittsburgh in 1907), and continuing with Victor Herbert's Natoma (1910). Cadman took note when Berlin's Königliches Oper picked up Poia for its 1909–10 season. “What do you think of Nevin's big piece of luck?” he wrote to Fletcher in June 1909. “I do hope his opera will prove successful, for a failure would likely put a damper on ours, don't you think?…I hope it makes a big hit.”18 Though the libretto for Daoma was well under way before Nevin's work appeared in Berlin, most of Cadman's composing happened after Poia had received a fiasco of a premiere in April 1910. Poia could thus serve as both model and cautionary tale. Several years elapsed between the summers Nevin spent on the Blackfeet reservation in Montana and his work on the opera.19 By contrast, Cadman's pilgrimage to “Indian country” took place with the opera project distinctly in mind and with La Flesche on board as musical adviser and guide. More important, while Nevin's approach was firmly Wagnerian, Daoma was to be a grand opera that would be “purely Indian” in its material—“ethnologically as well as artistically right,” as Cadman put it.

  What could count as “purely Indian”? This was a matter of some debate, even among the collaborators. As Harry Perison has shown, Cadman first evaluated musical material on his own and then worked with La Flesche to select appropriate melodies. In late summer 1909, Cadman followed La Flesche to the reservation at Walthill, Nebraska, where he spent several weeks helping make wax cylinder recordings, transcribing relevant tunes, and photographing Indian rituals.20Eberhart argued that the opera need not confine itself to Omaha song. Apparently still unaware of Poia, she wrote: “There will probably not be a market for more than one Indian opera and as a grand opera in three acts is a large undertaking would it not be best to use the finest of all melodies, making the opera national, as you might call it, instead of tribal?” On this point La Flesche seems to have prevailed as the opera incorporated only Omaha melodies and the closely related Pawnee melodies that Fletcher included in her book The Hako.21

  In most other instances, however, La Flesche's input was trumped by the composer-librettist team. When he objected to overly lyrical moments in the battle sequence of Act 2, Eberhart retorted, “Of course no Indian would sing [an aria] at such a time, neither would a man of any other nationality, but grand operas are never true to life.”22 For his part, Cadman later confided to Eberhart his rather low opinion of La Flesche's musical advice after he had been stung by La Flesche's critique of the opera's storm scene. “To tell the truth I think it was above his head,” Cadman rationalized. “It is very ultra modern…and also is not very Indian (ethnologically and scientifically). I told him he had not heard enough modern stuff and was not a musician or rather not enough of one to comprehend the orchestration in its full significance. He looked sort of shocked but had to admit my statement…. We dropped the subject.”23

  Disagreements of this sort and a lengthy hiatus necessitated by Cadman's ill health, together with an emphasis on ritual rather than dramatic action, may account for the lopsided structure of Daoma, one of the best explanations for its failure to reach the stage. The first act contains the least action and the most set pieces: fully ten of the opera's fifteen discrete arias or ensembles occur in this portion of the work, devoted to Aedeta's and Nemaha's discovery that they both love the maiden Daoma, their vow of friendship, Daoma's inability to choose between them, and their departure for war against the Pawnee. The action unfolds primarily in recitative, the least congenial medium both for Cadman (who was denied his trademark lyricism) and for Eberhart (who burdened her dialogue with archaisms and other stilted verbiage). Act 2 gives Daoma two arias in quick succession as she overtakes the encamped warriors and requests an impromptu wedding to Aedeta. She remains onstage during an offstage battle and anxiously greets the returning Nemaha, who attempts to convince her that her husband is dead, when in fact he has been captured. The melodramatic Acts 3 and 4 show the rescue, the lovers' return to the Omaha village, and the discovery that Nemaha was responsible for the treachery against his rival. Against cries for vengeance and pleas for mercy, Nemaha stabs himself. Thus the action establishes what Perison identifies as the dominant theme in Cadman's operas: “the swift and violent punishment of deceit or betrayal of friendship for the sake of love.”24 The impetuous Nemaha falls victim to his passions, while the more spiritually inclined Aedeta survives.

  More than Cadman's later operatic projects, Daoma relies on leitmotifs for coherence and, to a lesser extent, for characterization. In his correspondence with La Flesche, Cadman made clear that his models were Italian. “I have used the rigorous ‘modern' innovations in harmony,” he explained. “However, I am emphasizing MELODY and while my ‘working out' will hinge on the modern I shall follow the style of the Puccini and Post-Verdian School.”25 While working on Act 1, Cadman reviewed the Hammerstein Grand Opera Company's performance of Tosca and wrote to La Flesche: “The joy of seeing it and the object lesson in operatic construction and color was incalculable to me. I got many points.”26 Yet in terms of plot, Daoma departs from grand opera conventions. For one thing, it lacks a clear conflict between love and duty; to decide between her two lovers, Daoma instead trusts to the mysterious workings of
a game of chance. The faithful lovers survive, and their happiness is chastened, not secured, by Nemaha's self-inflicted retribution. Perhaps ironically, it is Cadman's treatment of the Omaha chorus that most recalls Verdi or Puccini. The only excerpts from the opera to achieve national broadcast (under Leopold Stokowski, no less) were the “Spring Dance of the Willow Wands” from Act 1 and the “Processional Dance of Sacrifice” from Act 3, numbers that could easily find counterparts in Aida or Turandot.27 As bearer of local color and arbiter of morality, the tribal chorus could be both “operatic” and “purely Indian.”

  The arias presented a much greater potential for stylistic confusion. How was Cadman to unite Indian melody, Italianate gestures, orchestral leitmotifs, and (if possible) something of the simple tunefulness that had made him such a successful songwriter? Daoma's Act 2 arias show all these elements jostling one another uneasily. The act opens with an introduction rich in leitmotifs, chiefly Nemaha's gapped-fourth fragment and Aedeta's syncopated circling figure, presented over a steady, pulsing bass. As the curtain rises, a chorus of warriors intones in octaves the melody of “The Moon Drops Low” from Cadman's Four American Indian Songs. In this operatic context, a new chromatic countermelody and a double-drumbeat accompaniment depersonalize but do not erase the foreboding associated with the well-known popular song. A sentinel announces Daoma's approach with the unaccompanied delivery of an “authentic” melody (“Hu-bae Wa-a n”). By contrast, Daoma's brief entrance aria, “I Have Come Here Alone,” opens over an accompaniment that lingers on E major for more than five bars (example 13). Three measures of borrowed melody give way to free paraphrase. Leitmotifs and quotation fall by the wayside, leaving behind a mixture of Indianist rhythms (the inverted accent at “pure”) and expressive chromaticism (“Scorn me not with disdain”). If this is verismo, it is verismo slightly unhinged by its encounter with Native America.

  EXAMPLE 13. “I have come here alone,” from Ramala (originally Daoma), opening (courtesy of the Cadman Collection, Historical Collections and Labor Archives, Special Collections Library, The Pennsylvania State University)

  The longer aria that follows, “I Have Followed My Love,” mirrors “I Have Come Here Alone” in scansion, sentiment, and gesture, but it is given the character of a cabaletta by its lively and utterly un-“Indian” accompaniment. When this excerpt won $150 in prize money from the National Federation of Music Clubs in 1911, the three collaborators were so buoyed by the early success that they began to discuss the distribution of future profits. Yet Daoma never reached the stage. When the opera was submitted to the Boston Opera Company, it was rejected as “dangerously untheatric,” despite the intercession of Cadman's friend, soprano Alice Nielsen.28 In an effort to capitalize on the “Land” and the “Water” of their well-known song, Cadman and Eberhart renamed the opera The Land of the Misty Water, but after it was again rejected in 1913 by the Chicago Opera Company, Cadman took more aggressive steps, dedicating an “Indian song” to director Giulio Gatti-Casazza's wife, Alda, before submitting the opera unsuccessfully to the Met in 1914. One more attempt to bring Daoma to performance involved hiring the young designer Norman Bel Geddes to create watercolor mock-ups of costumes and scenery and even a portable stage in miniature—all to no avail.29

  Cadman's commitment to verismo undermined the distinctiveness of his borrowed material. At the same time, the quasi-anthropological constraints of a “purely Indian” opera meant that stylistic plurality would not help delineate the principal characters—none is “more Omaha,” “more Wagnerian,” or “more Italian” than the others. Cadman thus inherited the difficulties of using borrowed materials while receiving no assurance that his quotations could enrich his audience's listening experience except in the vaguest of ways. Who, apart from Fletcher or La Flesche, would recognize that the tune cited at the beginning of Daoma's declaration of love was actually taken from a lament sung after the death of a warrior? If this choice was meant to foreshadow Aedeta's death, its irony would surely have gone unperceived.30 In addition, as Cadman was quick to admit, the opera project was plagued by poor timing. Not only had Poia been a flop in Berlin, but the very next year Victor Herbert's Natoma received only lukewarm reviews. F. S. Converse's The Pipe of Desire (1905) achieved little success when it finally reached the Met in 1910; his 1911 score The Sacrifice did better in Boston, but even this did not work to Cadman's advantage, for when he sent the libretto of Daoma to the Boston Opera Company, impresario Henry Russell quickly objected: “Oh, I see you have the ‘sacrifice' idea again! Can't you Americans write a plot without that?”31

  Perhaps the most telling reason for Daoma's failure was that its chief dramatic conflicts took place behind the scenes. In a literal sense, the battle between tribes occurs offstage, as does the near-fatal treachery of Nemaha. Metaphorically speaking, the cross-cultural tensions between Cadman, Eberhart, and La Flesche found no counterpart in the “purely Indian” love triangle and no audible resonance on stage. In addition to their quarrel over the storm scene, Cadman and La Flesche faced major misunderstandings about assigning proper credit for their ethnographic and creative work.32 The most serious incident occurred in 1911, when the Christian Science Monitor gave Cadman sole credit for secretly recording an Osage ceremony, when in reality he had merely transcribed cylinders that La Flesche recorded with the participants' consent. Cadman's name was omitted from La Flesche's subsequent Report to the Bureau of American Ethnology, and the two men never collaborated on fieldwork again.33

  It is hard to say how Cadman's career might have unfolded had Daoma been a success. Its trials and tribulations did not immediately dampen his enthusiasm for Indian material. On the contrary, the public still responded warmly to his Indian Music Talk, and the royalties from the Four American Indian Songs (together with a flurry of arrangements) were encouraging. He completed a collection called Idealized Indian Themes for piano in 1912 and dashed off a second quartet of songs titled From Wigwam and Tepee in 1914. In 1917, he published excerpts from his incidental music for Bel Geddes's Thunderbird, together with a new defense of idealization. Yet he would never again attempt an evening-length opera.

  GO WEST, YOUNG MAN…

  Equally profound, though indirect, was the impact that Daoma had on the geography of Cadman's career. When he began Daoma, he was a Pennsylvanian following in the footsteps of Victor Herbert and the Nevin brothers. By the time the score was finished, Cadman had lived in New Mexico, done fieldwork in Oklahoma and Nebraska, purchased a vacation home (christened “Daoma Lodge”) in Colorado, and set his sights on California. Daoma took him first to Europe, where Act 2 served as his laboratory for the study of orchestration with Luigi von Kunits. The rigors of the six-week trip wrecked his already fragile physique. Upon his return, a benefit concert was arranged to send the ailing composer to the Presbyterian Sanatorium in Albuquerque, where all strenuous activities (including operatic composition) were strictly off limits, at least during the first phase of his stay. After he recovered, Cadman made his home in Denver, and in 1916, when its mile high winters proved too severe for his respiratory system, he moved to Southern California, where he would remain for the rest of his life.

  The American West had long been a symbol of good health and clean living, as the writings of Theodore Roosevelt and others attest. Charles Lummis built on this rhetoric when he disparaged the “poor, anemic East” and reminded Farwell of the West's potential to foster and reward masculine strength: “Come out where the iron is, set up your forge, put the strong men outdoors to swing your hammers for you, and forge your brands.”34 For Cadman, the healing powers of the West were very real. The West was the site of his recuperation from sicknesses ranging from tuberculosis to the vaguer maladies of nervous exhaustion and stomach ailments. “I simply cannot live very happily or physically well in the East,” he wrote in 1919. “I have to be here where my health is always good, and where I can best do my work.”35

  But Roosevelt's and Lummis's words about the quintessentially mascul
ine West must have resonated somewhat differently for Cadman, whose homosexuality was secret from the public at large but abundantly clear to his friends. In 1911, for example, he wrote to the Eberhart family about his unmarried status with a poignant combination of shame and resolve: “When I analyze my true feelings I find there is something lacking in me as a human being. I then get ashamed of myself,—but the next minute I feel defiant and rebellious and say ‘No I will in spite of the Inferno BE YOUNG, FEEL YOUNG AND STAY SINGLE.' Good Lord how I run on with this nonsense!”36 Writing more than twenty years later, Cadman remained ill at ease with what he called his “weak body and certain tendencies I will have till I go to my grave but which I have managed to ‘manage' pretty darned well up to a certain point.” He continued: “If the public knew ALL [that] certain people know (and respect) theyd probably label me with the undesirables but as I say I have learned to control many things and I HAVE been as decent and good about everything and to those in my life whom I sincerely love and who love ME and so what the public doesnt know, I dont care a fig about.”37

  Indeed the paying public would have gained little insight into Cadman's sexuality from his scores. No same-sex relationships figure in his oeuvre, and although many of his Indian ballads focus on frustrated love, other hit songs indulge the most conventional expressions of romantic happiness. Cadman's private life did not make him especially sensitive to the marginalizing effects of stereotype; on the contrary, of all the composers treated in this book he had perhaps the deftest hand at sketching racial and gender difference in broad strokes.