DESCRIPTION:
Aaron Copland (1900-1990)

Billy the Kid - Complete Ballet (1938)

00:00 - Prairie Night (Card game at night)
02:47 - Gun Battle
04:38 - Celebration (after Billy's capture)

Antal Dorati conducts the London Symphony Orchestra. Recorded by Mercury in 1961.

"The career of the notorious outlaw William Bonney has given rise to a multitudinous folklore. It was at the suggestion of Lincoln Kirstein, director of the American Ballet Caravan, that Copland undertook the composition of a ballet inspired by Bonney's exploits. Billy the Kid was written in the summer of 1938 and first performed in Chicago in October of that year, with choreography by Eugene Loring, who danced the role of Billy.

"The complete ballet proceeds from one musical section to the next without pause. The Introduction is subtitled 'The open Prairie"; its widely spaced harmonies and chord-line melodies have come to symbolize a kind of American-ness that has entered the musical vernacular. Gradually the stage fills with people on the way west, with Pat Garrett leading the way. Cowboys appear, and the action really begins with a street scene in a frontier town. Folk tunes make the atmosphere specific; Copland has incorporated into the score material from such tunes as 'Great Granddad,' 'Git Along, Little Dogies,' 'The Old Chisholm Trail,' and 'Good-Bye, Old Paint.' These are sometimes quoted intact or relatively so, sometimes merely suggested, and frequently transformed as if they were original themes.

"Some Mexican women dance a jarabe in irregular rhythms. A street fight ensues, and Billy, as a boy of twelve, watches with his mother. Guns are drawn, and Billy's mother is killed. Billy, in blind fury, snatches a knife from one of the cowboys and stabs the killers.

"Successive episodes of Billy's brief career are presented in the ensuing scenes. Billy and his outlaw friends are playing cards under the stars; the quiet remoteness of the scene is underlined by Copland's setting of 'Oh Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie' as background. The game is interrupted by the arrival of a posse led by Pat Garrett and a running gun battle, in which Billy is taken prisoner.

"The scene changes to a drunken celebration of Billy's capture; the music suggests an out-of-tune saloon piano, with a long ostinato in C-sharp supporting the vulgar C-Major tune. Billy, of course, escapes. As he rests in the desert with his girl, the posse catches up with him, and Billy, lighting a cigarette in the dark, is killed by Garrett with a single shot. A short epilogue returns to the atmosphere of the beginning." - Halsey Stevens