Like the earthy promise of a "Big Rock Candy Mountain", the musical happily ever after resolve of 1928's The Bells of Capistrano is all about the ducats (to be be reaped from a secret Mission-era mine treasure!). Predictive and apt to the real estate hustles of its time, The Bells of Capistrano is an opera written by easterner turned lover of The Old West, Charles Wakefield Cadman.
Cadman was early on a fan of Native Americans and their music and lived for a time among the Omaha and Winnebago before eventually winding up in Hollywood. Cadman wrote film scores to make his living, but his heart was in the more "serious" realm of music: opera.
The Bells of Capistrano has all the suspenseful elements, however, of a Saturday matinee serial: a secret, a hidden treasure that saves the day, evil property speculators, mortgage collectors, a socially awkward romance, rebellious and discontented Indians, and rowdy cowboy heroes.
While Cadman may have considered the Bells of Capistrano "serious music", it is closer to vaudeville or the early Hollywood musicals of Gene Autry, say, than to Verdi or Pucini.
By 1933, The Bells of Capistrano was so far down the cultural artistry ladder that it was being presented by Minnesota high school students, none of whom, I suspect, were progenies destined for The Met or La Scala.
PS If there are any oldies out there who remember the Hamm's beer commercials on TV, the theme music "In the Land of Sky Blue Waters" was also composed by Charles Cadman.
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