The Tender Land is an opera with music by Aaron Copland (1900-1990) and libretto by Horace Everett, a pseudonym for Erik Johns. The opera deals with the arrival of a couple of itinerant workers on a Midwest, Depression-era farm on the eve of harvest and high school graduation, and the family tensions that surface with their presence. Copland was inspired to write this opera after viewing the Depression-era photographs of Walker Evans and reading James Agee‘s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. He wrote the work between 1952 and 1954 for the NBC Television Opera Workshop, with the intention of its being presented on television. However, the television producers rejected the opera. Eventually, the work had its premiere on April 1, 1954 at the New York City Opera, with Thomas Schippers as the conductor, Jerome Robbins as the director, and a cast including the young Norman Treigle.
