Missy Mazzoli: Proving Up (libretto by Royce Vavrek, after a story by Karen Russell). Opera Omaha, International Contemporary Ensemble, Christopher Rountree, cond. Pentatone PTC 5186 754.

Mazzoli, held in high regard among followers of the contemporary music scene, has been commissioned by the Metropolitan for an opera based on George Saunders’ Booker Prize-winning novel Lincoln in the Bardo, and has several well-received operas already to her credit. This one is about a family of land-grant farmers in Nebraska in the 1860s. It has an interesting historical background. The Homestead Act of 1862 provided for land grants in the then-scarcely settled Territory (Nebraska became a state only in 1867), where non-legal claims had become a source of concern to the Federal government and the slave-or-free issue of the Civil War then underway was a source of bitter contention. These included grants to railroads, to institutions of higher education, and, as in the opera, to individuals and families. For the latter, the grants had certain conditions attached, the principal ones being the establishment of a home (construction of a sod house with, at least according to the opera, a glass window) and the successful maintenance and cultivation of the land for a period of five years. After satisfactory completion of this term, the grantee was deemed “proved up,” and the grant became permanent. The prospect was a tempting one for many, including recent immigrants and, after 1865, war veterans, who were not prospering in the more thickly settled, urbanizing states further east.

Here’s what happens in Proving Up: Pa Zegner has stolen the glass for the required window (a precious commodity out on the prairie) from another family. Now the Zegners struggle to fulfill the “proving up” requirements. Along the way their two daughters die—though, there being a surrealistic time element at work here, they continue to participate in the action. Pa takes more and more to drink, and in a “state,” he’s decided to lend the window to a neighboring family so that they may pass the government inspection. The Zegners’ older son (a silent role, and so not a presence on the recording) being unreliable, Pa sends the younger one, Miles, on the perilous mission to carry the pane to the evidently quite distant neighbor, and to then surreptitiously repossess it and bring it back home for the hoped-for arrival of the Inspector. Miles sets out on horseback. Bad weather ensues. Miles thinks he’s in a dream, and he encounters a mysterious figure called The Sodbuster, who has his own history and somehow knows the Zegners’, including the theft of the glass. A confrontation ensues—Miles stabs The Sodbuster, who, unfazed, remains alive to overtake Miles just as he gets back to the Zegner homestead. There The Sodbuster displays the glass, which reflects the happy images of the family from whom Pa had stolen it. Miles dies, or at any rate joins the daughters in their grave. All sing that the conditions (“all that’s required”) have been met, and in an ending whose meaning remains obscure to me (perhaps it is clearer in live performance), Pa exits the stage, glass in hand, sarcastically intoning “all that’s required.” Vavrek’s libretto is occasionally in rhymed verse, sometimes in blank verse with an inner pulse, and at others is indistinguishable from prose. Since I haven’t read Karen Russell’s story, I can’t really comment on the degree of ingenuity in its adaptation to the stage.