by Beth E. Levy
Ice-cream Cone Vendors: Ice-cream cones!…
Indians: The drums grow silent, The dance is over!
Spectators: The sun is sinking fast!
…
Indians: Yo ho ho Hi yo ho hi yo ho…
The pow wow is a multiethnic event, but one in which society is strictly segregated, reinforcing one of the opera's morals: the inevitable doom of interracial mixing. Amy remonstrates with the faithless Lionel: “(earnestly) I plead for you and for our unity of blood. Each race is noble when the line is clear, but mingled bloods defile each other; It is the law.”52
As in Mrs. Everton's drawing room, the spectators at the pow wow are prominent and Anglo. They watch and offer comments—“Pow-wows are picturesque and quite unique; This has been a splendid show, a gala week”—again inviting the audience watching the opera to identify with the voyeurism of the onstage spectators. As they leave, Lionel starts to follow them. Shanewis stops him, crying out, “No, there's one more song!”—in effect, announcing the arrival of the opera's most “authentically Indian” moment just as her own appearance was presaged by Mrs. Everton and company (example 16).
The footnote in the score is telling: “This is an Osage Indian ceremonial song and is used by permission of the U.S. Bureau of American Ethnology.” Carefully separated from the preceding mélange of activity, the melody is unidealized, sung in vocables, and accompanied only by gourd rattles, timpani, and lower strings. Such an approach, apparently contradicting Cadman's usual “idealizing” aims, was evidently not so unusual in his stage works. In the foreword to his piano arrangement of the unproduced incidental music he wrote for Norman Bel Geddes's play Thunderbird, Cadman explains: “In the play…I used the above Blackfeet Indian tunes in their native state, without altering a single note…. making no attempt at harmonizing the melodies. All my ‘idealizing' such as you find in this piano score was indulged in at the fall of the curtain or between the acts. In this way the audience hears the tunes in ‘native form’ and later with the ‘white man's harmonies.’ ”53 Cadman implies that idealization can be separated from representation, but his distinction holds true only to a certain small degree. For Cadman, “representation” involved emphasizing difference (the Osage song, or the Blackfeet tunes in “native form”), while “idealization” aimed to assimilate (the “Spring Song,” or Shanewis herself). But in reality, the processes by which these two effects are achieved are startlingly similar, especially in their use of framing devices. As the curtain falls, the “white man's harmonies” merely replace the white man's gaze.
Strangely, the aspect of Shanewis that Cadman believed would ensure the opera's Americanness—its modern setting—also represents its most pointed fidelity to Tsianina's biography. It would have been easy enough to place her in a mythic past of Indian princesses and warrior braves. Instead, Eberhart and Cadman selected an interracial population and contrasting geographic settings: Mrs. Everton's Southern Californian salon and the Oklahoma reservation. One might argue that this aiming for Americanness explains the geographical stretching of the plot from the relatively narrow compass of Tsianina's upbringing (Oklahoma and Denver) to one that covers the entire United States (Oklahoma childhood, New York schooling, Los Angeles society). But the real Americanness of Shanewis lies in the title character's pronouncements about U.S. history. After Lionel's infidelity is discovered, Shanewis denounces white treatment of Native America: “For half a thousand years / Your race has cheated mine / With sweet words and noble sentiments.” She continues: “Your ships infest our rivers, / Your cities mar our hills. / What gave you in return? / A little learning, restless ambition, / A little fire-water, / And many, many cruel lessons in treachery!” This passage represents the opera's most successful exercise in integration. At the very moment when Shanewis's words call attention to antagonism between races, her music performs the opposite task, mixing Indianist and Euro-American elements with unusual freedom (example 17).
EXAMPLE 16. Shanewis, entrance of the “Old Indians”
Like the passages discussed above, Shanewis's monologue is framed, though its frame is more “western” than “exotic.” After Lionel interrupts her recitative, she counters, “Be silent! Let me speak,” while a descending melodic sequence leads to V of B minor, complete with rallentando and vocal line falling from dominant to tonic in an emphatic, cadential gesture worthy of any Italian opera. In this instance the monologue's function as conventional dramatic climax offsets some of its political implications. As Shanewis offers the opera's most racially charged statements, she simultaneously steps into the role of the outraged soprano, diminishing the specific impact of her words. At the moment when she might be most crucially heard as a Native American voice, Shanewis is even more powerfully linked to the operatic heroines of other nations, Lakmé, Aida, and perhaps Carmen.
A similar sort of balancing can be found between the melodic and harmonic styles of Shanewis's arioso. Its hexatonic melodic fragments and inverted-dotted figures are clothed in harmonies that are pure Puccini. Like a mirror image of the Caucasian singer Sophie Braslau, who sang the title role in elaborate buckskin costume, Shanewis's monologue presents its exotic elements in distinctly Italianate garb. This aspect of Cadman's harmonic language was not lost on his contemporaries; a reviewer for Musical Courier described Shanewis's love duet in terms which could also be applied to the monologue: “While there is absolutely no reason for charging Mr. Cadman with plagiarism, it is evident that he realizes that Puccini is the most effective writer for the musical stage today, and has accordingly taken the Italian for a model.” The Evening Sun, commenting both on the opera's harmonic idiom and (obliquely) on its racially charged setting, called Shanewis an “American Madama Butterfly.”54
EXAMPLE 17. Shanewis, opening and closing of the title character's monologue
Although Cadman gave Shanewis's monologue special attention, most reviewers did not mention it at all. This willingness to overlook the politically charged monologue text reflects a more general indifference to any of the social or cultural information encoded in the opera. Of the reviews I have seen, only one moved in this direction, remarking on the sharp contrasts in the score: “a tragic overture to a merry scene,” an intermezzo that was “light and gay by way of prelude to a swift and sombre conclusion”; “The double contrast was intentional, it was clever, and it worked like yeast in the dough. Under the sparkling froth of a society in which moved and sang an Indian girl of today, there could be felt the dark current of past dealings with the Red Man.”55 While the review wishes to dissociate the “Indian girl of today” from the “dark current of past dealings with the Red Man,” Shanewis recognizes no such separation of past deeds and present injustices; on the contrary, her monologue exposes Lionel's betrayal as one episode in a series of ugly acts that are but poorly covered by the mantle of Manifest Destiny.
THE ROBIN WOMAN AT THE HOLLYWOOD BOWL
Shanewis readily links Lionel's betrayal with decades of white duplicity, but she also recognizes her own ambivalent “modernity.” As she rejects the legendary vengeance of bow and arrow, she questions Progressive Era thinking about racial progress: “Am I too civilized or too weak?” The published synopsis states that she recognizes “the evolutionary distance” separating her from her ancestors. She struggles to reconcile past and present identities. Yet her uncertainty is but a shadow of the complexities that faced Tsianina. Both before and after Cadman had mangled her biography in order to achieve “grand operish” effects, she had been forced to speak both for the timeless “Indian” and for twentieth-century Native people coexisting with white society.
The Metropolitan premiere brought this tension into high relief. Confusion swirled in the newspapers about the opera's degree of fidelity to Tsianina's life story, and audiences in the lobby mistook her for the soprano assigned to sing the title role.56 Some on the Metropolitan staff felt that her presence onstage would enhance the production, and this pressure increased after the intended Shanewis, Alice Gentle, fell sic
k. Tsianina was confident of her ability to convey “the feel of Indian rhythm” and the proper pantomime rowing motions for the famous “Canoe Song,” but she declined the title role: “The opera would be a Metropolitan premiere and the story was based on my life…for me the responsibility was staggering.”57
While Tsianina did not consider herself ready to face the New York critics in 1918, there was little question that she would eventually sing Shanewis. This assumption had been key to the work's conception in Denver, and plans were soon afoot for a West Coast performance. The San Carlo Opera Company of San Francisco tried and failed in 1920.58 The California Opera Company announced its intent in 1921, but Shanewis never materialized. In 1924–25, a much publicized Hollywood Bowl production (with Tsianina in the title role) was announced, rehearsed, and abandoned due to internecine conflicts between the Bowl Association and Cadman's financial backers. Tsianina finally sang Shanewis in December 1924, in two Denver productions that were paired with Cadman's “operatic cantata” The Sunset Trail. But Cadman had to wait until June 1926 to see Shanewis staged in California, after his supporters rallied decisively to the cause. In November 1925, Cadman's agent, L. E. [Lyndon Ellsworth] Behymer, incited a grassroots campaign for a Hollywood Bowl production, and local pride won the day.
By the time Shanewis reached the Bowl, two important changes had taken place. First, the story of The Robin Woman had gained a following through excerpts presented in recital and so-called operalogues, semistaged productions usually hosted by music clubs.59 A similar spirit of informality extended to the Hollywood Bowl, where high society liked to exercise its “communal feeling” through mammoth Easter sunrise services and Farwell's celebrated “sings.” Given that the “Clubs and Civic Organizations of the Southwest” served as co-sponsors for the show, it makes sense that Cadman's crowd of singers and extras expanded to fill the outdoor stage. While the Met had preferred more realistic costuming, the Hollywood Bowl production followed Cadman and Eberhart's suggestion that the principal singers and the chorus in Act 1 should be costumed to depict “outstanding characters in American History.” Cadman himself made a guest appearance as Shanewis's onstage accompanist, reinforcing the cast's emphasis on community participation and masquerade.
As the status of Shanewis was altered through its informal network of dissemination, Tsianina's reputation underwent a complementary transformation. The idea that she might sing the opera's title role during the Met's second season was quashed in part by General Pershing's call for volunteers to entertain American soldiers stationed in Europe. Tsianina embraced this mission, boosting morale and even putting together a show called “Indians of Today and Yesterday” with Native American soldiers. She was back on American soil in time to make a forty-three-stop tour with Cadman during the 1919–20 season, and she brought with her a new sense of self-worth. In her own words, “At the beginning of my career with Mr. Cadman I had a feeling it was all his, that the honor all went to him. I now agreed that he had done a lot for Indian music, but that the Indian had done a lot for him, too.”60
In keeping with the newfound confidence of the Indian Princess, the demography of the cast for Shanewis underwent a visible change for the Hollywood Bowl production. The Mohawk baritone Os-Ke-Non-Ton sang the role of Philip Harjo, which was expanded with him in mind. The producers also invited Indians from ten reservations in Arizona to dance during Act 2. Curtain calls thus featured around one hundred actual Indians (instead of a handful of painted “redface” Indians drawn from the Metropolitan Opera chorus). The publicity for the production emphasized the Indian and Hispanic history of the amphitheater itself, describing the West Coast premiere as “another glorious chapter of musical history in the Southwest” set to transpire “at the foot of Cahuenga Pass, near El Camino Real, the King's Highway of a past generation, where the Indians rested enroute to and from the pueblos of Los Angeles and Santa Barbara, in the Hollywood Bowl.” In this context, Mrs. Everton's seaside bungalow underwent an ethnic relocation, becoming “the Spanish patio of a home in Santa Monica.” Her former parlor was thus pulled partially outdoors into the picturesque twilight. Similarly, for the pow wow, only a few scattered tepees were required to transform the California stars into the night skies over Oklahoma (a couple of prominent palm trees notwithstanding).
FIGURE 5. Shanewis at the Hollywood Bowl. Courtesy of the Cadman Collection, Historical Collections and Labor Archives, Special Collections Library, the Pennsylvania State University
The Hollywood Bowl production of Shanewis displayed a heightened awareness of its own “Indianness” from start to finish. As the pow wow scene dwarfed Mrs. Everton's patio, so Lionel (played by Texan tenor Rafaelo Diaz) was now outmatched by Harjo as a potential love interest. More striking still was an interpolated Indian “invocation.” Tsianina described the overall effect: “Indian tepees covered the hills behind the platform. Indians on horseback rode down the trail. To the right of the stage was a campfire with Yowlache, a Yakima Indian, in breach [sic] cloth and with arms outstretched singing in a gorgeous baritone voice, ‘Wah-to-ho—Rise, Arise. Life is calling thee.' It was a stunning picture.”61 Although the printed program labels this invocation as an introduction to the pow wow scene, Tsianina remembered it happening just before the overture. In either position, this number constitutes a significant reframing: here the Indian is indigenous, emerging out of the natural landscape. It is Mrs. Everton and her fancifully costumed guests who seem out of place.
All in all, the Hollywood Bowl production was infected with a spirit of pageantry not unlike that which motivated Arthur Farwell's nearly contemporaneous “Theater of the Stars.” Rehearsals for Shanewis were not yet under way in the Bowl when Farwell's March of Man graced the outdoor stage at Fawnskin, yet the two productions were separated by less than nine months. Farwell and Cadman were apparently on cordial terms during Farwell's California sojourn (1918–27), as Cadman on occasion expressed his regret at missing a chance to visit with Farwell under Charles Lummis's roof at El Alisal.62 No evidence survives to suggest that Cadman heard The March of Man, and Farwell left behind no written impressions of Shanewis. But if any of their mutual friends—Lummis, Artie Mason Carter, or a host of community music makers—did make the trek between the Hollywood hills and the mountains of San Bernardino to hear both works, they would have witnessed in dramatic fashion how each composer chose to interact with his Californian setting and how each mobilized his vision of the West.
When Farwell appeared as the Seer in The March of Man, he presided over an ecological spectacle with Wagnerian overtones and little ethnic import. Despite their “jazz instruments,” his careless vacationers are as Anglo as the white-clad World Soul. Although Farwell and Fawnskin advertised strong attachments to Native America, in The March of Man such connections were at best atmospheric; whatever communion it might have offered between white and Indian was spiritual, abstract, and mediated by the awesome power of nature. By contrast, in Shanewis, the outdoor air of the pow wow is but a backdrop for human and musical conflict: the layering of so-called jazz, faux-Indian chant, and operatic recitative; the juxtaposition of Osage ceremonial song and Italianate love duet. While Farwell cast himself as the prophet in a drama of messianic revelation, Cadman impersonated himself (as Tsianina's accompanist) in a drama of historical encounter.
4
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Staging the West
“GOOD INDIANS, DEAD INDIANS”
Cadman's was a scenic imagination. Before his career came to an end in the 1940s, he had written operas or operettas set in Puritan New England, Arizona, California, the upper Mississippi Valley, Mexico, Cuba, and Japan, as well as pageants for Colorado and Portland and a small assortment of film music. With or without Indian characters, these works offer variations on the theme of encounter: between cultures, between lovers, and between man and nature. Cadman's high school operettas, like his vast quantity of pedagogical piano miniatures, were written more or less on demand for publishers eager to meet
a market for “good” and useful music. Designed to be immediately accessible, these works traffic in stock figures, offering a valuable index to early twentieth-century associations between people, places, and sounds. By extracting the western highlights of this catalog and organizing them into a “scenic tour,” I depart in this chapter from the chronology of Cadman's career to address his treatment of the varied musical ecosystems of the West and to allow brief side trips into the works of his near contemporaries.
Before we embark on our tour, it will be worthwhile to address one important feature of Cadman's dramatic practice in its Indianist context: the tendency to articulate threatening or violent emotions through ethnically “marked” material and to assimilate happy sentiments into more conventional, often loosely Italianate, musical gestures. When Shanewis was performed as part of Denver's 1924 Music Week, it shared the bill with Cadman's newly expanded cantata, The Sunset Trail, to which the published score appends an explanatory subtitle: An Operatic Cantata Depicting the Struggles of the American Indians Against the Edict of the United States Government Restricting Them to Prescribed Reservations. With a libretto by Denver resident Gilbert Moyle, The Sunset Trail is one of Cadman's few Indianist works independent of Eberhart. As was the case in Daoma, no white spectators intervene to justify a distinction between familiar and exotic idioms. Instead, Cadman's score links unmarked music (typically diatonic and functionally harmonic) to supposedly universal feelings and uses the hallmarks of Indianism (pentatonic passages, ostinati) to signal moments of racial difference.
At the close of the piece, for example, tenor Redfeather staggers mortally wounded onto the stage and, with his beautiful Wildflower, briefly recalls music from their earlier love duet—operatic music at its least exotic. In the passages that follow, however, Cadman gradually moves to unfamiliar harmonic ground as the Old Man exclaims, “We have heeded a false prophet!” and eventually to stasis as the Chief states, “Thus are we punished!” An interlude of open fifths prepares for a final reprise of a choral outburst invoking the “Great Spirit” in stacked pentatonic lines. In the space of fifty bars, Cadman provides enough unmarked music for a convincing love duet and enough exoticism that the defeat of the Indians, at the hands of an invisible white army, can be accomplished with minimal moral qualms.