S.D. Symphony Orchestra revives Pulitzer-winning opera from the 1950s
In 1873, a pregnant Norwegian woman looks up to introduce herself to the unrelenting vastness that is the South Dakota prairie — and she is terrified.
The golden grass is tall and suffocating, a sod hut for her family is not yet built, there is an unmarked grave atop an Indian burial ground beset by locusts, and the blinding winter blizzards rob any comfort of a horizon.
But with everything her eyes take in, from the east where she came from and the west where she’s going, she speaks to none of it so as not to break the utter bliss the same view gives her husband.
She sees “nowhere to hide”; he sees his kingdom.
This is fictional man and wife, Per Hansa and Beret, who with their children and a few other Norwegian families have immigrated to Dakota Territory, land established in 1861 and today in southeast, South Dakota.
Per and Beret’s multi-faceted story is poetically told in the novel “Giants in the Earth,” written in 1925 by Norwegian-American novelist Ole Edvart Rølvaag and loosely depicted from journal entries penned by his father-in-law, Andrew Berdahl.
Rølvaag married Jenny Berdahl in 1908 and drew inspiration from the jarring, real-life experiences her family faced while coming to mid-America.
There was open sky and momentous sunsets, “but the prairie can also turn deadly,” the late Washington-based author Hal Simonson once recounted about Rølvaag’s book, “a menacing foe with horrible features, a monster seeking to drink the blood of the settlers.”
The book sold nearly 80,000 copies in its first year, became required reading in South Dakota and was later adapted into a Pulitzer-prize winning American opera by mid-20th century composer Douglas Moore, known widely for “The Ballad of Baby Doe” found often in standard repertoire.
His “Giants” opera premiered in March of 1951 at Columbia University in New York City. Tickets were $1.20.
But then Per Hansa and Beret’s story fell silent. Save a one-off performance in 1971 in North Dakota, “Giants in the Earth” was somehow untouched for over 50 years — until South Dakota Symphony Orchestra music director Delta David Gier happened upon the score with the same delight Per Hansa found our prairie.
“Somebody’s got to do this,” said Gier, an enviable and ambitious giant himself who has been leading the century-old South Dakota orchestra for over 20 years. “It all happened right here in South Dakota! This is a historical opportunity, and we are the people to take it.”
A long-lost revival of Moore’s “Giants in the Earth: The Norwegians in the Dakota Territory” — returning exactly 100 years after Rølvaag published the pioneering tale — will premiere April 26-27 at the Washington Pavilion in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and be performed by the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra.
Garnering attention from afar
To resurrect this opera seems a crowning zenith for Gier’s powerhouse career in South Dakota.
Even helming a 75-member orchestra in the Midwest with a “microscopic budget,” Gier’s work ethic is revered worldwide. While being inducted into the South Dakota Hall of Fame in 2020, the SDSO was defined as “benefitting greatly both in enrichment and its reputation” with Gier’s lead.
When he won the Ditson Conductor’s Award in 2022, he was cited as “the model of an engaged conductor.” Later in 2022, long-time New Yorker magazine music critic Alex Ross called the SDSO “bold and savvy” and as one capable of “forging its own identity.”
With what Gier calls his “fabulous musicians” under his baton, he is a risk-taking music maker, always leaning toward the unconventional contemporary works, and many clamor to see what he’ll do next.
After a $2 million donation to the symphony, Gier felt supported to make “Giants” his next big thing, an ambition many other American contemporary conductors would likely not take on, even with that kind of monetary support.
For one, there are no recordings of Moore’s opera, and the music only existed in manuscript form. An appendix and engraving of the lyrics would also need to be completed, and Gier took this upon himself, both for his orchestra and for any future companies he is confident will perform this after he does.
“I am so invigorated by David’s vision,” said SDSO executive director Jennifer Teisinger in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. She’s been working with Gier since 2019. “I trust him, and I’m not intimidated to try something new like this.”
Tom Morris, who led the Boston Symphony for over 35 years and recently published a memoir that mentions the great work Gier is doing with the SDSO, calls it “exceptional leadership.”
“There is really no better example of Gier’s courage than unearthing this opera,” he said, “a wonderful but fairly forgotten American story that resonates with the area.”
The opera industry is a smaller, closely connected community, and people just keep talking about this. For a Pulitzer-winning opera with “such freshness, beauty and distinct character,” according to the Pulitzer jury in 1951, to not have maintained its reign is puzzling, which has only piqued more interest and envy.
Already, the seats are being assigned with what Gier calls “royalty.”
Simon Woods is president and CEO of the New York City-based League of American Orchestras, and he has announced his plans to attend.
“The South Dakota Symphony Orchestra is one of the most creative and community-focused orchestras in the country, and I have long wanted to experience it firsthand,” Woods said. “The ‘Giants in the Earth’ project is especially fascinating as it’s an example of orchestra using the power of music to delve deeply into local history and identity.”
How music serves as education in history
To educate our community on the preservation of South Dakota history has long been an uncanny trait in Gier, and it’s why “Giants” is such a nice fit for his career.
In the early 2000s, he formed the Lakota Music Project, an effort to “demonstrate friendship” between Native Americans and non-Natives in our region through the art of music.
The effort is similar here, to inform the audience on what immigration was like for the Norwegians and Italians, the Danish and the Irish who came here escaping famine and helping to develop the region.
For exposure to “Giants,” the SDSO will be offering a free book club to the public. On Augustana University’s campus in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, guests can visit the cabin in which Rølvaag wrote the book in 1923. Augustana also used to maintain the Rølvaag / Berdahl family house that was built in 1883. It has since been relocated to the Threshing Bee Grounds in Granite, Iowa.
Descendants of the Berdahl family will be in the audience, as well as Rølvaag’s granddaughter, Solveig Zempel, who is a professor of the language department at St. Olaf University in Minnesota.
Zempel also will be coaching the opera singers in Norwegian diction.
“This is such a big responsibility,” said Meredith Lustig, a New Hampshire-raised opera soprano who will play Beret in the performance. She was one among 10 singers who made the cut after Gier auditioned over 100 candidates in New York City and Minneapolis for “Giants.”
“To have this piece that is fresh and new, but old, is a rare gift to take on and bring back to life without the expectations from other interpretations. I’m so privileged to be the harbinger.”
A love story ‘worth celebrating’
Seattle Opera’s resident baritone Michael Hawk will play the gleeful Per Hansa. The unprecedented “Giants” is already standing out in his career that usually spans the many popular canons, like Pagliacci, Hamlet and Camelot, but Hawk is eager.
“I play a lot of bad guys,” he said. “It’s so fun to now be this ball of energy! Even faced with adversity, what Per Hansa brings to life is joy, and that’s a message we all need.”
“Giants” — named after the “men of great stature” in the Book of Genesis — is a perfect love story with a breathtaking scale of performance. Per Hansa adores his “Beret girl,” and she honors her spouse with dignity, despite her melancholy.
He endures the elements with “inexhaustible strength” while his wife endures depression and regret, both of them capitulating in unexpected ways.
“We don’t recognize how lonely that life was, how desolate and how brave it was to make that trip,” Lustig said. “It’s so easy in opera to write off dramatic women as madness. But I want to make Beret relatable to the audience.”
That’s Gier’s hope. He asserts that the symphony is not “entertainment,” it is transcendent art, of which requires focus and a desire to relate and connect. With a “can-do” spirit, he trusts concertgoers worldwide will lean into “Giants” with heart.
“Contemporary music is a living art form that should serve its unique community,” he said. “I am here to build something significant for them.”
How did a half-century come and go without the music of “Giants”? Maybe the opportunity was waiting for someone like Gier.
Or maybe it is our Maestro Gier who has been waiting for an opportunity like this: To be the magician who will make live again the sounds of a merciless South Dakota prairie that only Per and Beret once knew.
“I am really interested in organizations that are willing to be daring artistically,” said music business veteran Morris. “One of those organizations is the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra. They are worth celebrating! And that is why I am coming to hear it.”
