In 1954, Douglas Moore (1893–1969) and John Latouche (1914–1956) began working on an opera about the infamous “gold digger” and “homewrecker” Elizabeth “Baby Doe” Tabor (1854–1935). Two years later, the Central City Opera premiered the result, The Ballad of Baby Doe, a work wedded to the age-old binary of the virgin or the whore. The second wife of Colorado silver king Horace Tabor (1830–1899), Baby Doe was known for her beauty and for her ability to wrest Tabor away from his first wife, the devoted and long-suffering Augusta Pierce Tabor (1833–1895). At the outset of The Ballad of Baby Doe, Augusta appears as the respectable woman (the virgin), and Baby Doe as the sexualized other (the whore). Yet as Moore asserted in 1958, The Ballad of Baby Doe is “unusual” because “the golddigger who should be the villain is not”; over the course of the opera, Baby Doe “grows from a little nitwit into a wonderful woman.” Baby Doe transforms, impossible as it may seem, from a whore into a virgin.

The Ballad of Baby Doe has proven Moore's most enduring work. According to Opera America, it is currently the eighth most-performed American opera. The Ballad of Baby Doe also remains closely associated with the voice and career of Beverly Sills (1929–2007), the soprano who helped to popularize the opera and who made the title role her own. When I first began listening to The Ballad of Baby Doe and to Sills, I could not help but wonder from my vantage point in the twenty-first century what had drawn Sills to the title role. Was this soprano, who would go on to have a sensational career, as both an opera singer and administrator, all while raising a family, really so attached to such simplistic narratives of women's experiences and identities? Did Moore's music somehow make up for or gloss over the opera's narrative? To both questions, I think the answer is no. Sills was clearly drawn to Moore's music, but a close examination of her perspective on Baby Doe reveals how she sought to dismantle the dualistic paradigm embedded in The Ballad of Baby Doe. Sills identified with Baby Doe, and she worked, as she put it, to turn her back into “a real woman.”

This was no easy task.