The Ballad of Baby Doe 1961

Synopsis
Artists

Based on the lives of historical figures…

…in Leadville, Colorado, the opera chronicles the real-life love story of Elizabeth “Baby” Doe Tabor, a young woman who falls for wealthy Colorado silver magnate Horace Tabor, leaving behind his first wife Augusta, as their lives intertwine with the boom and bust of the mining industry, culminating in a tragic downfall marked by love, betrayal, and the loss of fortune.

Music By

Douglas Moore

Book and Lyrics By

John Latouche

Act I

The story of this opera is fact, not fiction.

The Colorado Gold Strikes of the 1850’s attracted the bold, the adventurous and the merely footloose from all over the country. Among those arriving in the new Eldorado was Horace Tabor and his prim wife, Augusta, who had left the stony acres of Vermont to seek their fortunes in the western mountains. Like so many of the hopefuls, they suffered years of poverty. Then they struck it rich. With his first strike, Tabor bought the Matchless Mine, out of which poured a littering treasure of silver.

In his fifties, at the height of his wealth and power, Tabor met Elizabeth McCourt Doe, nicknamed Baby Doe by the miners of Central City, where she lived with her weakling husband, Harvey. The meeting was not accidental. Baby Doe had come to Leadville to better her fortunes, and one way to do that was to know Horace Tabor. But what began as a calculated maneuver developed into an abiding devotion for the man thirty years her senior. Their secret marriage was followed by a spectacular and calamitous Catholic wedding in Washington, D.C. President Chester A. Arthur attended and was appalled when he learned the truth about the ceremony. Polite society forever outcast Horace and his Baby Doe.

Act II

Tabor’s fortune began to fade during the panic of 1893. He backed Bryan and free silver; McKinley and the gold standard won. In 1899 Tabor died penniless, begging his wife never to sell the Matchless Mine. She kept her promise. in 1935 her long vigil ended when she was found frozen to death at the site of the mine she had never deserted.