Mormons, opera and Mormon operas

The Mormon opera, Deseret, A Saint’s Afflictions,

appeared in New York in October 1880.  Its composer, Dudley Buck, who

was not a member of the church, capitalized on the American hysteria about

polygamy and fashioned a comedic melodrama of cavalry soldiers, native

Americans, a Salt Lake City polygamist and his wives, one baby and an

unscrupulous Indian agent.

I became aware of this opera only recently, when

Darrell Babidge, Assistant Professor of Voice at Brigham Young University, wrote to ask me about

it. Janet Bradford, head

of the Music/Dance Library at BYU, discovered a libretto

for Deseret in the Harold B. Lee Library

collection. She led us to

a selection of arias that were published and are now housed (and available as

PDF files) at the Library of Congress.

Think Gilbert and Sullivan’s “I Am the Very Model of

a Modern Major General” as you read this aria sung by the villainous character,

Joseph Jessup: 

“I fear that the Lieutenant may discover my

duplicity,And not believe that I was driven to it by

necessity;So I will git me up and git and fly from this

vicinity,And take with me a specimen of Mormon

femininity.” 

I cringe when I say Deseret is a Mormon opera. Buck’s opera (libretto by W.

A. Croffut) and another opera named Deseret by Leonard Kastle (libretto by Anne Howard

Bailey), which was commissioned and broadcast by NBC-TV in 1961, are Mormon

operas in the way that the molto-Italiano Puccini’s La Boheme is French. That is, not very.

So what about Mormon opera (translation: operas

written by Mormons)?

The church has a rich history of vocal performance