Billy the Kid

The ballet Billy the Kid was Copland’s first major work to explore and convey a sense of open-air space, evoking the landscape of the American West—an aptitude that became and remains a much-loved quality in his music. In 1938, ballet impresario Lincoln Kirstein approached Copland for a score based on the story of William H. Bonney (pseudonym of Henry McCarty), known as Billy the Kid. McCarty’s short life of robbery, cattle-rustling and gunfighting in New Mexico and Arizona ended when he himself was shot by the legendary Old West lawman Pat Garrett in 1881. Over time Billy the Kid's story came to signify the charismatic outlaw figure in the mythology of the West—the idea on which Copland’s one-act ballet is based. The action is framed by a superbly atmospheric opening and closing tableau, “The Open Prairie", across which columns of settlers are seen trudging westward. Billy’s story is set in and around a frontier town, with episodes including “Prairie Night (Card Game at Night)” (with quietly atmospheric trumpet and flute solos) and “Gun Battle” (a barrage of percussion). Billy the Kid was staged first in Chicago in 1938 with a two-piano accompaniment and then, to much acclaim, in New York in 1939 with an orchestra. That year, Copland arranged a concert suite from the music, removing some scenes and shortening others to reduce the ballet score’s 32-minute duration by about a third; this is usually how the work is performed today.