In late 1917, near the start of the U. S. involvement in the "Great War," the composer Arthur Nevin (1871–1943) was engaged to serve as the song leader at Camp Grant in Rockford, Illinois, where he was responsible for instructing nearly 40,000 U. S. Army trainees in the art of community singing. Simultaneously with these military duties, he was also preparing for the long-awaited world premiere of his second opera, A Daughter of the Forest. The work was not a new one, for the project originated almost a decade earlier. As early as January 1910 Nevin and his librettist Randolph Hartley were already drafting a score initially titled Twilight. At the time, they were travelling throughout Europe, Northern Africa, and the Near East while awaiting the Berlin premiere of their first collaboration, the Indianist opera Poia.¹ Had Poia been a success, they were clearly aiming to have a follow-up score ready in the wings. After Poia's disastrous critical reception in Berlin, Nevin and Hartley instead turned their attention to New York's Metropolitan Opera as a possible home for their follow-up work. If Berlin would not welcome the work of an American composer, Nevin reckoned, then U.S. audiences deserved to be the first to hear Twilight.² By February 1911, the New York press was reporting that Guilio Gatti-Casazza, the Met's manager, and Alfred Hertz, the Met's conductor, had accepted the work. The opera's three-role cast was to feature Johanna Gadski, Ricardo Martin, and Herbert Witherspoon. This was a momentous turning point in the history of American opera: the Met had mounted its first American score, Frederick Converse's The Pipe of Desire, a year earlier; Victor Herbert's Natoma would receive its New York premiere at the end of the month; and a $10,000 contest for a new American opera (ultimately awarded to Horatio Parker's Mona) was underway. In an interview with the New York Daily Tribune, the composer trumpeted his hopes for Twilight. "I am especially glad that American composers are getting a hearing in their own country," he explained, "because it will show Europeans that we are not quite such ignoramuses as many of them think." Poia's failure in Berlin made him all "the more determined to get a hearing before a jury of my own countrymen."³ Despite Nevin's eagerness, the opera was never performed. Although a March premiere was expected, Gatti-Casazza ultimately chose to withdraw the work, citing the need for revisions to the orchestration.⁴ According to Henry Krehbiel, who was always privy to the inner workings New York's operatic scene:

It was plain to all close observers that Signor Gatti had not been permitted to exercise the discretion which ought to have been vested solely in him in announcing that the new opera would be performed, and also that he felt no heart-burnings when he proclaimed later that its manuscript material was of a kind that made the promised production impossible.⁵

Nevin's dreams of operatic success in his home country were thus cruelly thwarted, and with the Met now out of the picture, Twilight remained dormant for the next six years.

     The work resurfaced again in early 1917 (prior to his deployment to Camp Grant), when Nevin was in the midst of his community music activities under the auspices of the University of Kansas. Cleofante Campanini, manager and principal conductor of the Chicago Opera Company, had taken an interest in Nevin's work and decided to present not only the world premiere of Twilight as part of his 1917–1918 season, but also the long delayed American stage premiere of Poia during the 1918–1919 season. Nevin spent the summer of 1917 at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, where he undertook final revisions and renamed the work A Daughter of the Forest.⁶ The Chicago Opera Company would be a perfect home for Nevin's score. It was the nearest major company to his home base in Kansas and it became even more accessible once Nevin relocated to Camp Grant. In terms of vocal star power, it yielded nothing to the Met in New York: Amelita Galli-Curci, Mary Garden, Genevieve Vix, Hector Dufranne, Gustave Huberdeau, and Lucien Muratore were all on the 1917–1918 roster. The company's repertory, likewise, favored contemporary works over older staples and regularly introduced "novelties" to the Chicago audience. The 1917–1918 season, for instance, offered eleven twentieth-century operas, three of which were world premieres.⁷

List of Twentieth-Century Scores in the
1917–1918 Repertory of the Chicago Opera Company⁸

Composer	Work Title	Date of Stage Premiere
Gustave Charpentier	Louise	1900
Giacomo Puccini	Tosca	1900
Claude Debussy	Pelléas et Mélisande	1902
Jules Massenet	Le jongleur de Notre-Dame	1902
Henry Février	Monna Vanna	1909
Pietro Mascagni	Isabeau	1911
Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari	I gioielli della Madonna	1911
Riccardo Zandonai	Francesca da Rimini	1914
Henry Hadley	Azora *	1917 (December 27)
Arthur Nevin	A Daughter of the Forest *	1918 (January 5)
Sylvio Lazzari	Le Sauteriot *	1918 (January 19)

* Chicago Opera Company world premieres

     The company presented no German-language operas that season, not, as one might presume, because of increasing anti-German sentiment, but rather "owing to the attitude of patronage during last season" and because "last season's venture with Wagner did not pay out," as press reports explained.⁹ Campanini was particularly eager to include new American works, noting in an interview with the Musical Courier, "I have … made it an object to see the best that I could of the native composer."¹⁰ Taken in total, the circumstances could hardly have been more auspicious for Nevin. A Daughter of the Forest would be staged by a company adept at producing new works, as part of a season that included much modern music, and in a context where conditions were primed for the acceptance of American scores. Furthermore, the three-singer cast featured only native English speakers. Soprano Frances Peralta, English-born but California-raised, created the title role (photo of Nevin and Peralta — Library of Congress). The Canadian-American tenor Forrest Lamont sang the role of the Lover, while James Goddard, a bass-baritone from Tennessee, portrayed the Father.¹¹ The composer himself, clad in his army khakis, took the podium. The opera company's support of the troops extended beyond this opportunity for Nevin. Subscribers with unused tickets were asked to return them to the box office where they, along with any other unsold seats, might be given away to members of the military.¹²

     Randolph Hartley's libretto uses a formal and archaic style of English, in terms of grammar, diction, and vocabulary. While this decision may seem to diminish the relatability and expressivity of the characters, heightening their function as impersonal archetypes, Nevin found such a text to be well suited to his compositional goals. He explained, "it is perfectly possible [to compose opera in English] if the librettist uses simple Saxon words. Of course, many English words are impossible, but anyone who has listened to an oratorio knows how perfectly the words of the Bible go to music. This is because they are almost entirely of Saxon origin, and Mr. Hartley has used such words in his libretto for my opera"¹³ The plot is set within an Appalachian forest in autumn, during the time of the Civil War. The events unfold over the span of a day, a night, and the next morning—each being one of three so-called "pictures." Nevin's organizes his score as a single, uninterrupted act, with the orchestra providing interludes and linking passages between the vocal scenes. The piano-vocal score is accessible online; subsequent page references are to this, the only published edition of the score.¹⁴

     The Father is a woodsman. He lives in a cottage alone with his Daughter, whom he has raised since her mother's death when she was a small child. In response to their isolation from the world, the Father has brought her up with a sort of pantheistic faith in the goodness of nature that is without a foundation in the moral expectations of society. The Daughter, however, has met a Lover. When the curtain rises, she is awaiting his return and singing of their newfound love. When he at last arrives, they proceed to sing a lengthy duet, in which the Daughter acknowledges "It is Nature's desire that I love thee; 'Tis her deed that our hearts are at tune" (p. 13). Their bliss, however, is interrupted by the sound of drums in the distance. It is the Lover's battalion about to depart for battle. He acknowledges his patriotic calling: "The land of my birth is crying / For the safety her sons may give / And content are the sons in dying / To know that our land shall live!" (p. 25–26). Desire is too strong to be resisted; the Lover and the Daughter embrace as the stage lights darken and an orchestral interlude brings the first picture to a close.

     The second picture takes the audience inside the Father's cottage that evening. He returns from hunting and sings of his happiness: "I of all men am content, in tune with nature's harmony: content am I and doubly bless'd since God hath sent the joys of fatherhood to me" (p. 34–35). This passage also reference's the work's original title. Later the father sings, "May there never come a twilight to our day of love and peace" (p. 36–37, emphasis added). (The "twilight" he fears does, of course, arrive at the opera's tragic conclusion.) He notes the Daughter's delay in returning home, but he does not worry, assuming she must be distracted somewhere, admiring the beauty of nature. When she finally enters, he suspects she is keeping a secret from him and soon guesses, "Thy heart hath found a kindred heart. Thy soul hath found its mate" (p. 48–49). When the Daughter confirms it, he is overjoyed, because "'Tis Nature's noblest law to love, and thou art Nature's child" (p. 50–51). The Daughter, however, is worried that she might lack a true understanding of motherhood, given that she grew up without a mother. The Father reassures her that motherhood "is the noblest state that woman knows" (p. 52) but issues a stern warning that seems to contradict all he had previously taught the Daughter about Nature and love: "Destroyed, aye, thrice destroyed is motherhood that hath not thro' the creed accepted holy wedlock rite; acc urs'd, accurs'd is she of God, despis'd of men!" (p. 57–58). The Daughter recognizes the consequence of these words, but the Father is oblivious to their implications. The Lover's battalion is heard drilling nearby and soon the Lover himself appears at the cottage. The Daughter begs him to remain with her, while the Father again issues a well-meaning but stern pronouncement: "Before all else comes duty to our land / Our motherland who calls in her distress" (p. 66). The Lover rejoins his unit, leaving the Daughter to her grief. The Father, believing that she is merely distraught at his departure, attempts to reassure her and bids her goodnight. Left alone, she comes to a stark realization:

The oath that nature would bestow me,
Can never know the sunlight or the stars
And so I may not tread the path of men
Lest I offend! Lest I offend
I understand, at last I understand.
But Nature hath a highway all her own
That leads unto a land of endless peace.
One pays in toll just one last little sin,
And from all pain and sorrow finds release. (p. 74–76)

She prepares to leave the cottage one final time. Closing the shutters and blowing out the candles, she takes her father's pistol with her on the way out the door.

     The brief third and final picture occurs at dawn the following morning. An orchestral interlude depicts the awakening of nature, but as the stage lights begin to rise, the audience sees the Daughter lying dead beside a stream, with the pistol at her side. The Lover enters, dressed in uniform, and comes upon her lifeless body. The Father soon appears too. Both men recognize their shared guilt in the Daughter's death. The Lover claims, "This is my deed!" while the Father admits, "The truth I taught her was but half the truth, the half-light of the dawn" (p. 95–96). The Lover seizes the pistol and prepares to join her in death, but the Father prevents this rash action. To the sound of military drums in the distance, he reminds the Lover, "Thy duty lies before thee, there" (p. 97). The Lover rushes off to rejoin the battle, while the Father remains, a solitary figure, alone in the forest.

     Because Nevin was busy with his song leader duties at Camp Grant, he engaged less with the press in the days leading up to the opera's premiere than was typical for him. Earlier comments from 1911, when the score was under consideration at the Met, help to clarify the collaborators' intentions. Regarding the Civil War-era setting, Nevin explained that they initially "hesitated whether or not we should lay the action there, or during the Revolution or the Mexican War." Ultimately, the Civil War won by default because "we thought that the bright costumes of Revolutionary times would be too great a contrast with the spirit of the drama, and because many Americans do not consider the Mexican War a very noble page in our history." The chosen time period also addressed Nevin's concern that he "could not write an opera about modern American life. It lacks color, and suggests high hats and evening dress. He who is able to operatize the silk hat may arrive, but I am sure his name will not be Arthur Nevin."¹⁵ Such justifications aside, it may strike one as problematic to choose a plot setting through a process of elimination rather than from the basis of a compulsory artistic desire.

     Given the opera's scenario, one might reasonably anticipate that Nevin would include quotations from characteristic Civil War-era melodies. Nevin's interviewer seemed to expect as much, asking the composer whether he had "introduced any typically American music" into the score. Nevin responded:

What is typically American music? I for one have never been able to find any. I have striven to write music to characterize my figures, to give color and atmosphere, to carry on my story, above all, to write music that is melodious. Melody should always be supreme. This is why I do not like Debussy, though I admire his wonderful musical talent.¹⁶

It is not entirely apparent what Nevin meant by "music that is melodious," yet his ambitions as an American composer extended far beyond the simple idea of quoting familiar melodies to achieve "local color." Indeed, his score is marked by an absence of anything that his Chicago Opera Company listeners, accustomed to Puccini's (or Massenet's, or Mascagni's) lusciously over-ripe vocal lyricism, would likely have perceived as memorably melodic. Nevin's idiom, in fact, is closer to Debussy's Pelleas than his dismissal of the composer's style might at first suggest. Vocal lines generally are declamatory and of irregular lengths, with reiterated pitches and frequently awkward leaps of fifths or larger. The harmonic palette includes an abundance of chords colored with tertian extensions. Tonic cadences are often avoided, and through his persistent chromaticism, the composer stretches tonality to a not atypical late-Romantic extreme. Even straightforwardly diatonic vocal passages, such as that sung at the climax of the Daughter and Lover's duet from the first picture, are undercut by Nevin's slippery chromatic vocabulary and the density of the accompanying texture (see pg. 21).

     In what is arguably the score's musical highlight—the Father's condemnation scene from the second picture (pg. 54–58)—Nevin creates an impressively sustained crescendo that extends for twenty bars over a measure-long harmonic ostinato. The ostinato reflects the Father's unwavering conviction in his beliefs, even if, once shared, they will ultimately destroy the Daughter. The persistent half-step alternation in the bass, between E-flat and D, suggests the implicit danger lurking beneath the Father's ideas. Again, the declamatory vocal line avoids any sense of melodic tunefulness, even while keeping to the pitches of a Lydian scale on E-flat. It grows ever higher in tessitura until the passage's final vocal pitch at last abandons the mode and reaches a climatic E natural, supported by an ominous French augmented sixth chord built upon B-flat that is allowed to linger as an unresolved dissonance. On the strengths of a passage such as this, the opera's subsequent neglect seems not entirely warranted.

     Although the whereabouts of the full orchestral score and parts are unknown, the published piano-vocal score reveals much about the details of Nevin's orchestration through extra cue notes and abbreviated instrumentation indications. This published reduction was the work of William Henry Humiston. A pupil of Edward MacDowell and a successful composer in his own right, Humiston also conducted opera and wrote program annotations for the New York Philharmonic.¹⁷ Humiston's manuscript, the source from which the John Church Company prepared their published edition of the opera, is now held at the Library of Congress.¹⁸ Given Nevin's dense chromaticism and thick orchestral scoring, it comes as no surprise that Humiston at first struggled mightily to tame Nevin's texture in adapting it for two hands at the piano. This challenge is evident across the opening few pages of the manuscript. Several erasures are clearly visible, showing how the arranger made decisions about which orchestral lines should be included in the piano part. In the image below, Humiston used the vocal staff in the fourth measure to sketch a possible substitution for his preliminary ideas. After settling upon this alternate solution to the problem of condensing Nevin's orchestral texture, he then erased his initial thoughts back to the beginning of the system in the treble (right-hand) staff. He then transferred this chordal outline to its proper place and extended the idea back to the beginning of the phrase. These measures occupy the fourth system of page 6 in the published score; the notes there appear exactly as in the final (non-erased) version. In this and in other examples, Humiston's replacement revisions consistently clarify the underlying harmonies at the expense of contrapuntal detail. As his work progressed, Humiston apparently developed a successful system of reduction, for such erasures only appear in the first few pages of the score.

Excerpt from pg. 2 of W. H. Humiston's manuscript piano reduction of A Daughter of the Forest, Music Division, Library of Congress (author's photograph).

     Nevin's opera finally took to the stage on 5 January 1918. It shared the program with Jules Massenet's miracle-opera Le jongleur de Notre-Dame. The event received an unfortunately small share of media attention at the time. The long-awaited return of Mary Garden to the Chicago Opera Company had occurred the night before (in Carmen), while the day after the premiere, a controversy arose between the company's star soprano, Amelita Galli-Curci, and the director Campanini over whether or not she was contractually obligated to participate in the company's upcoming New York tour. (Ultimately, Campanini's insistence won the argument and Galli-Curci did perform in New York, where she was a stunning popular success.)¹⁹ The divas' activities, in this instance, seemed to draw the attention of the press away from the efforts of an American composer. When the reviews finally did appear, they were mixed at best. Felix Borowski, critic for the Chicago Herald, wondered why the opera "evoked so little excitement from the souls of those eager partisans of opera in the vernacular," before proceeding to dissect the weaknesses of plot and libretto.²⁰ The review in the Christian Science Monitor likewise faulted Hartley, commenting that he "knows nothing about the necessities of a composer of dramatic music."²¹ Frederick Donaghey's comments for the Chicago Daily Tribune are more substantive, but still occupied only a single paragraph of his usual column:

[Nevin] is a good composer and a real patriot; and I should like to be able to say of his piece that it is an addition to the repertoire. It isn't. It contains some lovely, well-made music, not much of which is for the voice. … The 'book' was not better than any other homemade libretto so far exposed. Miss Peralta, Mr. Lamont, and Mr. Goddard did as well by the words and music as, maybe, any three singers might have done.²²

Charles Watt, writing for the Music News, praised the cast "for the artistry and the loving care with which they accomplished their tasks." He thought that Nevin "conducted very skillfully" and complimented the composer's score for being "very original in sound, very beautiful in fleeting moments, and altogether outre for the most part." While he found "the flow of orchestration" to be "really wonderful, perhaps even as wonderful as that in Pelleas and Melisande," he worried that "no more unvocal score has ever been given any singer than that of the Father." The scenic design received special praise from Watt, who believed that "the play of special effects was splendid. The moonlight pointing out to the girl the location of the revolver on the cabin wall—the rising sun searching out the face of the dead girl on the ground—these and many more things were beautifully accomplished." Taken in total, Watt felt that the "very great and very enthusiastic [applause] … was amply deserved in every case." Nevin himself received twelve curtain calls. Yet Watt's cautious conclusion seems prescient in hindsight: "Let those admire it who will, but the prediction is that these will be few and that it will not come often again to performance."²³

     In fact, subsequent performances numbered precisely zero. Although the work had initially been announced as part of the company's repertory for their New York tour, it made for an easy omission from the eventual lineup: Nevin had to resume his Camp Grant responsibilities, so another conductor would have had to learn the score. Given the logistical challenge of transporting an opera production by train for performances at another venue, Nevin's work was not the only score to suffer such a fate. Rather, this came as no surprise to the Chicago Opera Company's New York audience. As W. J. Henderson explained, "Mr. Campanini's promised list of novelties dwindled as the season advanced. That, however, is the invariable way of operatic promises. Every year sees generous announcements of forthcoming novelties which refuse to come forth."²⁴ Indeed, the season overall, both in Chicago and on tour, lost considerable sums of money, despite being considered the Chicago Opera Company's strongest artistic effort yet. Regardless of how much faith Campanini might have placed in Nevin's works, plans to create an expensive production of his earlier opera Poia were never going to get the board's approval at this point. Moreover, Campanini's health declined midway through the 1918–1919 season. He stopped conducting in January of 1919 and died on December 19, leaving the Chicago Opera Company bereft of its founding director and Nevin without an advocate.²⁵

     Admittedly, Nevin's circumstances must have made repeat performances of A Daughter of the Forest impossible; none but the premiere were ever advertised, and the expectations in New York were never more than rumors in the press. Despite the audience's opening-night enthusiasm, an examination of the score makes it clear why the work failed to resonate with the times. Much about the world had changed between 1910, when Nevin and Hartley first conceived of the opera, and 1918, when the work was finally performed in the midst of the Great War. Nevin himself believed that "The story of the opera has to do with the struggle of a man between duty to his country and love for the girl he has betrayed, and consequently the patriotic note must be strong."²⁶ Yet the composer's hopes for achieving a "strong patriotic note" seem disappointingly removed from what one encounters in the work itself. As already discussed, Nevin's decision to omit quotations from familiar Civil War melodies eliminated one surefire way to develop a recognizably patriotic soundworld. Instead, offstage military drums and underlying march rhythms are the extent to which Nevin seeks to portray patriotism through music.

     The plot, likewise, seems out of step with the patriotic currents sweeping the national mood. Although situated during wartime, the opera's Civil War-era context is minimized to the point of generalness, appearing almost incidental (or irrelevant) to the on-stage events. Conflict arises from a contrived inflexibility (the Father's) and a mistake borne of ignorance (the Daughter's)—neither of which seemed particularly pertinent to the kinds of decisions Americans were facing every day. Whereas the Lover and the Father both invoke a sense of national duty and reflect upon issues related to military service and the hardships of separation, their tone fails to convey the sense of uplifting hopefulness that listeners (including Nevin's singing soldiers at Camp Grant) could instead find in abundance in patriotic popular songs. As the opera ends, the Lover rejoins his comrades on the battlefield primarily to expiate his share of guilt in the Daughter's death. At Camp Grant, in contrast, trainees left behind their loved ones because they truly believed that their nation required their service. Moreover, the opera's unnamed and impersonal characters seem to navigate a merely metaphorical path through the challenges of love, faithfulness, duty, and obligation. Nevin's audience members, on the other hand, were grappling with the wartime realities of these same issues on a daily basis.