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Riders of the Purple Sage: From Pearl Gray to Ed Mell

Riders of the Purple Sage, by Zane Grey, was published more than a hundred years ago--in 1912--and it remains one of the most famous of American Westerns literature.

Mari and I had tickets to see the premier of what I think is the first opera based on a rip-snorting, Wild West, good-guy, bad-guy, gun-totin', cowboy and cowgirl story, so we downloaded the book itself.









It is more the story of a strong and good woman than it is about cowboys and Indians.  All of the Indians in southern Utah seem to have been disappeared before Jane Withersteen inherited her grand, purple-saged ranch.  What was left behind were Mormons and Gentiles, who did not get along any better than cactus and coyotes.

Jane is the good guy--strong, decent, good-looking, god-fearing, single, and stubbornly refusing to marry a Mormon man so that her eternal soul could be saved and she could make more little Mormons.  Mormons generally, but a Mormon bishop and elder in particular, are the bad guys.  John Lassiter rides in on a quest to find his little sister, long ago hauled off from Illinois with Mormons driven west to Utah, finally.

Religious people might very well squirm, or perhaps just wriggle around to a more nuanced spot at the story, but Jane is a Mormon, too, and the struggle is really between her and her church, or perhaps, just about the West, and us, generally.

The Opera did what operas do:  it sang the story lines as operas do, and whatever else can be said for opera, recitatives are not their high points.  Recitatives allow the singer to adapt their singing to the rhythms of spoken or written speech, and that seldom results in great music.  And if one wants lyric speech, Zane Grey did a better job of that without singing.   I was delighted, at this most recent reading of Riders, at the almost old-fashioned elegance of what he wrote.  But, after all, he wrote it more than a hundred years ago.  Pearl Zane Gray was born in 1872, in Zanesville, Ohio, and my have been named after a description of Queen Victoria's mourning clothes as "pearl gray".
(He later rearranged his name to become Zane Grey.)

The other characteristic of opera, the aria, when at its loveliest, is a soaring, breath-taking solo, and that never quite happens in Riders of the Purple Sage, the Opera.  After all, such musical genius is not often found.  Nevertheless, there were moments in the opera when I had to take off my glasses to wipe tears, but they were at the believability and heartbreak of the story, more than the grandeur of the music itself.

Grandeur, in the opera, Riders, was provided visually.  The paintings of Ed Mell, whom I knew little about--see www.Ridersopera.com --provided a breathtaking background for the new operatic telling of something uniquely American and commonly human.


To the credit of the Arizona Opera Society, premiering a new opera in Tucson and Phoenix, closed captioning was provided at the top of the backdrop, but El Mell's stunning art insisted that the story be as much visual as it was musical, or perhaps that the story of Riders of the Purple Sage be experienced as visual music, quite as Zane Gray had described what he saw, beautifully.

In this case, music built an arch from what Zane Grey said, to what Ed Mell saw.









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