A coincidence: it happens that my forebears on both sides (Osbornes, Fosters, Meads), for three generations back, were Nebraskans—clergymen, teachers, farmers, and their families. According to my mother’s extensive researches (she was an indefatigable genealogist long before Roots, Ancestry.com, et al. came on the scene), they were in Nebraska by the Proving Up times (that would be my great-grandparents’ generation). One branch settled north-central, up along the Niobrara River, others farther south, east, and west. So I heard a few stories in my Nebraska/Colorado childhood. There’s no question that life was difficult for the land-grant pioneers. They were beset by freezing winters, prairie fires and dust storms, crop failure, grasshopper plagues, and their own inadequacies. Children did die, and I’m sure scarcities did lead to theft and other un-neighborly acts. While a majority of grantees succeeded in “proving up” and Nebraska was flourishing within a couple of decades, there’d been a high rate of abandonment and personal tragedy along the way.^(I)

But goodness gracious, as my mother might well have said, surely they didn’t have to hear this music! Mazzoli wants us to endure every blurred-time moment of the Zegners’ ordeal, and her opera, just eighty minutes long, does make us wonder by the halfway mark if the five years aren’t perhaps up by now. After an opening summons sung by Pa standing in for Uncle Sam, which offers some promise of prosperity for the settlers and companionable listening for us, her exemplary contemporary chamber orchestra shrieks, pounds, glisses, and moans, creating an assaultive atmosphere of sweaty drama that too often remains just that—a generalized atmosphere. Stretches sound more like serial sound effects than they do like music. I wanted to root for the Zegners, but there was almost nothing in the score to make me care in the first place beyond the sort of sympathy we feel when we hear of the misfortunes of people we don’t know—that’s awful, what a shame. The two good low male voices involved (baritone John Moore, as Pa, and bass Andrew Harris, The Sodbuster) alternate impressive phrases with guttural snarls and the sort of straight tone an Alberich or Dr. Schön might take on to persuade us of his character’s unloveliness. The more straightforwardly written soprano role of Ma Zegner is sung by Talise Trevigne; her excellent intonation and access to the part’s range are compromised by cloudy vowel formation and a vibrato pattern that interferes with her basically attractive voice. As Miles, Michael Slattery shows a light, bland tenor and clear word formation. The voice is in a sense well suited to the part of a just-pubescent male, but unless he’s holding out on us for the sake of that impression, its undeveloped upper range makes it hard to imagine him in anything else. All these performers are musically right on their toes, executing what’s wanted of them. It’s the “what” that’s at issue. They are overbearingly recorded; we’re pummeled into submission.