Last week students, businessmen, ranchers and punchers from all over north Texas poured into the little town of Denton to hear the first opera that ever got its world premiere in the Lone Star State. What they heard was not musical history in the making but local history in the remaking; and they loved it. Composed by Julia Smith, a hometown girl made good (via Manhattan's Juilliard School of Music), Cynthia Parker incorporated Indian dance-tunes, frontier songs like Lost My Pardner and Chicken Reel, as well as some lovely home-made music.
The opera told a story from the 1830s which many of...
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