This is a production of SDPB.

Discussing Giants and the Earth is supported with your membership and the friends of SDPB.

Thank you.

Major funding for this program has been provided by the Berdahl family.

Alan, John, Tamme, Tommy and Anabel, whose family history helped inspire Ole Rolvaags acclaimed novel.

Additional support for this production is provided by Augustana University.

Rooted in faith, service and the liberal arts.

Home to Ole E. Rolvaags Giants in the Earth.

Writing.

Cabin.

Norwegia American Historical Association, now in its second century of inspiring connections to Norwegian American experiences and home to the Ole Rolvaag papers, and by a grant from the South Dakota Arts Council, South Dakota Arts Council.

Support is provided with fund from the State of South Dakota through the Department of Tourism and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Well become like Giants here.

Rich as this earth!

A Pulitzer Prize winning opera goes from artistic archive to international spotlight.

Our story begins with a Norwegian fisherman.

Ole Rolvaag Here, in this humble cabin, he wrote an epic novel of survival, land taking and tragedy.

Our story takes us t a very different room than this a lavish concert hall not far from the epicenter of the Norwegian migration.

Thousands of music lovers, book lovers and descendants of Nordic ancestors will take their seats to experience giants in the Earth.

Performed as an opera at the time of its premiere in April 2025.

Virtually no living person has seen the opera on stage, but plenty of Midwesterners know the story.

It was my first year here in South Dakota, and Art Husebo was the founder of the Center Fo Western Studies at Augustana he gave me a cop of the book Giants in the Earth.

And he said, and, you know, there's an opera.

And, I'm thinking, you know what grand Ole Opry?

I don't know what he's talking about.

Then I researched the opera, and lo and behold, not only an opera, but by Douglas Moore, who' a very well known and respected mid-twentieth century American opera composer.

And they won the Pulitzer Prize in 1951, and it was performed at Columbia, in 51.

And, then one other tim in, Grand Forks, North Dakota, sometime in the 70s.

But other than that, not performed at all and never recorded.

So I keep referring to this as finding a diamond on the side of the road.

It's the story of the very first Norwegian immigrants to this part of the country, to eastern South Dakota, and near to Sioux Falls, actually.

So, at the beginning of the book and the opera, you have two couples that are part of a community that have been here already, and they're waiting for this other family to come.

Per Hansa and his wife, Beret.

And, they they, they embody the struggles that, that went into building a community.

Per Hansa is a very headstrong man.

He's he's, he's ready to build an empire, you know?

And Beret, her heart is still in the old country.

She's not sure that she should be here.

She's following her husband.

She loves him dearly.

But, she is the, She's that woman who.

Who wants so much to hold on to, the traditions, the religion of their family.

It's a story of any immigrants, you know, of the, the that, the second generation wants to wants to pull off and become American, you know, and so but in this opera, you get the conflict between the husband and wife, the husband who wants to buil something, the wife who's trying to hold on to something of the past.

It's almost like these two characters were both living in Rolvaags mind, probably at the same time.

And on his good days, he probably felt a little bit like Per Hansa.

You know, it takes that kind of spirit to leave your home and to go to a new country.

But I'm sure there were days or moments when Beret's character felt more familiar.

Those days when you're you're anxious, you're lonesome, you're homesick.

That was a combination of pus and pull, pushing out of Norway, where the opportunities were much more limited.

Land was limited.

There was no country other than Ireland that lost a higher percentage of its people to immigration.

And those early years of immigration really were very rural people leaving rural areas and coming to rural areas in North America.

As time goes on, and that's more people in urban area that are also making that move.

But early immigration was was very rural.

What needed to happen to bring it to the stage?

I ordered the perusal scores from, the publisher, took me quite a while to, to, you know, track that, track it down.

Which publisher wher where did this material reside?

And I got this huge box of of scores, all in manuscript, and looked to look them all over and, and then I spent another, you know, a series of months trying to track down an archival recording from that original production in the 50s.

And, I went to Columbia and they told me it was in the Library of Congress.

Library of Congress then said, no, no, it's it's definitely at Columbia.

So, finally, finally tracked it down and got thi absolutely wretched recording.

I mean, the performance itself was was not very good, but it was enough to, you know to get a sense of of this opera.

I mean, it's, you know, and it's a really a full blown American opera.

What's happening in America when this is premiered, Douglas Moore was actually, right at the center of us trying to fin our American musical identity.

And so right in there with Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein, he, he was the head of the music department at Columbia University.

So, yeah, just just right right at the forefront of that and everything that he wrote had to do with Americana.

He really believed in finding an American voice in classical music.

So, so this fits perfectly within that, the phrase that's used today by historians to describe what his beliefs were is called cultural pluralism which I think is a great term.

And you're right, Rolvaag directly in his some of his nonfiction essays, rejects the idea of the melting pot, the melting pot being, people come over here and their ethnicities get thrown into a pot, that kind of melts them into some mixture that's much better and larger and greater.

But they're Americans.

He favored a land of of ethnicities.

It's a democracy of ethnicities.

He wanted America to be a multilingual country.

He wanted it to be a country open to all.

He was quite clear about this, open to all races and creates in religious groups.

He, favored, again, a land of, of many languages.

Does it sound like America?

Yeah, absolutely.

It sounds like America from the get go.

Like the the, the opening measures of it sounds you can hear the openness of the prairie and the loneliness of the prairie.

(Gentle, wide open prairie sounding music) And that music keeps coming back through the opera, particularly around the central character of Beret, who's wrestling with with so many issues, but, loneliness being, being one of them.

And it's, but it's a, it's a very American sounding, open kind of Plains kind of sound.

(Gentle, wide open prairie sounding music) The title of Ole Rolvaags book Giants in the Earth comes from the book of Genesis.

There were giants in the earth in those days.

The book is a love story, a tragedy, a cultural history, an ecological witnessing.

Giants and the earth is equal parts adoration and cautionary tale.

Perhaps most notably, it is a story of place role.

Vogue wrote the book in this small cabin lakeside in Minnesota.

Sometimes he would paddle on to the lake to fish.

His wife, Jenny, would play music across the water when she wanted to call him home.

(Classical Music Playing) This writing cabi is probably the most important literary artifact that Augustana University possesses.

Where I'm sitting, I can look out one of the window and there's a desk there, and, he would have looked out Big Island Lake, and it was, pretty secluded, you know, forest area.

And he would have written on the porch as well.

And I think he predominantly did much of his writing on the porch.

But to have a sanctuary like this is absolutely vital, especially for a novelist.

And I know that he wrote the first draft of Giants in the Earth, September October 1923, and he averaged about 5000 words a day.

I appreciate that he was looking out over this lake with all of these trees.

And ye he's writing about prairie grass and the sort of wave like motion of the prairie grass.

And of course, he's writing about winter while he's surrounded by, b some mosquitoes in the summer.

There's some dissonance, at least for me.

I'm thinking about my own writing process of being situated someplace and being attuned to what is around you.

But at the same time, the way that the creative writing works is that you get transported somewhere else.

My grandfather was ten years old in that wagon train, youngest person there.

And, and so I, I regretted the fact he was always quiet, man.

I regretted the fact I never asked him any questions about it.

Wouldn't it have been a wonderfu to hear first hand.

He lived to be 92, Living in a little house in Garretson, South Dakota When you're thinking of a Beret who is struggling with, you know, seeing the grass flowing as, as the ocean and she, she was moving westward.

She her heart was in it was back at home.

And that's as true for a lot of people.

How do you how do you continue to move west.

And that was what Per Hansa did.

He was he was on the different side.

(Singing: “... the Earth and the Sky ...”) And you saw the contrast between those two people.

He wrestled very much with people losing their tradition and losing who they who they were.

You had to have two lands, so you had to have two lands.

And here we are.

We're in America.

Do we have other parts of the world that we feel part of as well, or are we so focused and 1 in 1 place?

And he helped.

He helps us to see that it is broader than that.

That' what I liked about his writing.

He gave sounds and voice to the earth and to creation in a beautiful way.

It's, and it really helps u to think in terms of our world as more alive as opposed to something inanimate.

I'm so aware of the fac that this land is not our land that has been blessed by the Native Americans, and it has a spirit and soul of its own.

And I was so glad how Ole brought into his writing, his appreciation.

And Native Americans who ar humans, just like us, he said.

I thought it was terribly important in that time in the 20s.

Can you imagine?

It was not very acceptable.

This land that's being homesteaded was just aquired by the United States in 1858.

So 14 years before that, through treaty with the Yankton Sioux Tribe.

But it's a whole bunc of land that the Yankton Sioux Tribe ceded to the United States and reserved for themselves.

Basically, what's Charles makes County today?

This was their traditional land.

They had only known that land is theirs.

And then in 1853, this treaty was signed and it was transferred to the United States.

And then it was open for homesteading in 1862.

So though that's kind of the immediate backstory to how this land was there for free for immigrants, not for American Indians.

I thought the representatio of American Indians in the novel were about the best I've seen in a long time from a non-Native writer.

To me, they're not.

They're not afraid of them.

They're, treated as human beings.

And that's sometime that's all we're asking, right?

Just treat American Indians like human beings and be truthful there.

You don't hear anything about an Indian killing anyone in that whole novel.

And that's how it was.

I think we needed to give him credit for crafting a novel that defends and celebrates the creation of a new farm, tremendous amount of labor that goes into that.

The value of a place like that to raise a family, the value of that, to create a community.

And, I think we need to read the book as a, again, a way of capturing a very personal level of the great, the great, pageant of the Norwegian migration, which had its own unique qualities.

It was an amazing event.

This was kind of a primal work.

On immigration, I have, firs editions for all of my children.

Because I think it's very important for them to know that story.

And, as I get older, it becomes more important to remember the roots.

Can't forget your roots or where you come from.

And what the what that means for you.

It's also a book in translation.

Those first two were the two books.

You know, those two books are in and and Norwegian and, and they were quite popular in Norway and he had them translated to English in 1927, you know, one of the great masterpiece of American literature, really.

And it has while it was written about one immigrant group, I think it has so much universal appeal to any person who has immigrated by choice, basically, understanding the what's gained, what's lost, the cost of immigration.

It's been translated into dozens of languages.

It's been translated into Braille.

You know, it just resonates with so many different groups of people around the world.

Because while it's a particular story set in South Dakota, I think the the story itself is universal human experience the cultural importance of it.

Then for people today what do you think that would be?

Well, the story of migration continues.

You know, in some way it's never been more important.

We're still a nation of immigrants.

It's still a theme.

And everyday life, there's still people leaving one home to make a a new life in another home and still making those choices of what they're what they're gaining, what they're losing.

I'm wondering if you can help me understand some of the, the context of, of evil, of, the malice of trolls, that there's some things I would call Norwegian folklore, but that also mix in with religious beliefs that especially we see through the eyes of Beret.

You know, the character who is, is processing what it means to live here, bu still thinking about home, but also thinking about the forces of nature personified.

What does that bring up for you that I think is important for people to understand?

Well, I think part of i is the setting of the prairie.

It was a strange place.

It was a powerful place.

Anyone who's lived on the prairie and lived through a prairie winter, it's not hard to understand the magnitude of that setting that she was getting used to.

You know, leaving the more protected valleys of Norway to those wide open spaces where there was nothing.

Nothing to hide behind, nothing to, Yeah.

Just you were so exposed, both to the elements and to the eyes of God in her mind.

Tell me about some of you first impressions of that book.

Now that you've no that you've read it, capitalism.

I can see in I that's just so strong in there in my mind, this idea of capitalism and, just that process of of colonizing an and and implementing capitalism, whether it's over a sea or of water or in a sea of grass, maybe it's some of those same processes play out.

And another aspect is religion and how religion, you know, it's just so shocking.

Or the role that religion play in, in that novel multiple ways in, in positive ways and in extremely deadly ways.

All the native peoples here and not just the Oceti Sakowin Oyates but all the other tribes as well.

This was this was their sacred land.

It's not in the Middle East.

This is the sacred place.

This is where all their, ancestors came from.

It's it it's fundamentally different than everyone else in North America.

Their sacred lands and their spiritual traditions go back to the somewhere in the East.

It's.

They're Christians, somewhere to Europe or middle East.

Then I think then as you kind of zoom in.

Yeah, it could be lonely.

And one reason it might be lonely for those, those main five families or individuals.

That's not a society.

These were a few friends, maybe, but they didn't live in a in a structure they didn't all traveled together.

They they're staying i their houses that are scattered and 160 acre plots.

Right.

So there's there's forced isolation by this homesteading process.

Whereas when the American Indians are mentioned, they're traveling through as a group, and they're living together, everything as, as a, as a community.

(Singing: “Look at that Beret!

Can you imagine that?”) (Singing: “Put down the stakes and the land is yours!”) As much as we want to lift that up as, like, a heroic story, we need to be careful about this settler narrative.

There was a cost to this.

And somehow that cost, that trauma, that sadness, that grieve, that struggle.

Is God angry with me?

Why am I here?

Why did I get to be put here?

And I myself have struggled with that when we, you know, have hard days as being an immigrant.

And my husband and looking at ourselves and saying, what were we thinking, right?

Why did we come here?

This is so hard that that gets passed down through generations, whether it is, through promises made right, make sure that this church will never go away.

So when we pass each other in the street, we don't know each other's story.

And and it's really in the sharing of the story.

We have been greete with such an overwhelming amount of warmth.

Because we look like the rest of the people, and it's now our time to welcome everyone, regardless of where we come from.

(Applause) The revival of Douglas Moore's opera Giants in the Earth goes beyond opening night.

Maestro Delta David Geier says he hopes the opera takes on new life in the music world.

The cultural collaboration of the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra's Lakota Music Project has also gained international attention.

(Native American and classical music combined.)

What's our responsibility, as a symphony orchestra is what it always is.

And that's the present art to present art.

That's, that's that's good.

And what was that?

Art that is relevant to our community?

And I think this opera very much does that Lakota music project is, is also, equally, if not more important to do because it's it raises awareness of, of this, you know, you know, arguably the mos important culture of our state and, and it, it builds a bridge between our two cultures, helps us to understand one another by the sharing of music of both of our cultures.

So, so I, I see these two projects as sort of two tracks, but parallel and both important and both relevant to who we are and what we do.

That is the role of arts to bring these things up.

And what we do with those feelings and those thoughts is up to us.

What we hope to engender in people is the best in us that music can can bring forth the best in us and can can help us to aspire to yes, to better relations, but to doing the right thing.

But what's the right thing to do now?

You know where we are now in this situation, and how can we be in dialo with one another in meaningful dialog and productive dialog with each other?

Across these racial divides and cultural divides in such a way that that we can forge a way, forward, that that lifts us, lifts us both up, you know, that restores what has been lost, that builds on what has been built.

You know, and I would hope that, a story like Giants in the Earth, a project like the Lakota Music Project, would engender that, that hope that those aspirations.

Discussing Giants in the Earth is supported with your membership and the friends of SDPB.

Thank you.

Major funding for this program has been provided by the Berdahl family Alan John, Tammy, Tommy and Anabel, whose family history helped inspire Ole Rolvaags acclaimed novel.

Additional support for this production is provided by Augustana University.

Rooted in faith, service and the liberal arts.

Home to Ole E. Rolvaags Giants in the Earth, Writing Cabin, Norwegia American Historical Association, now in its second century of inspiring connections to Norwegian American experiences and home to the Ole E. Rolvaag papers, and by a grant from the South Dakota Arts Council, South Dakota Arts Counci support is provided with funds from the State of South Dakota through the Department of Tourism and the National Endowment for the Arts.