Arnold Sundgaard, 96; librettist, playwright, children’s author

Arnold Sundgaard, a librettist and playwright who worked with such leading composers as Kurt Weill, Douglas Moore and Alec Wilder and also wrote plays, stories and children’s books, has died. He was 96.

Sundgaard died Oct. 22 at The Forum at Park Lane retirement home in Dallas, according to his daughter, Joy Kaiser. The cause was congestive heart failure, she said.

He was best known for his collaboration with Weill on a revised version of “Down in the Valley” in 1948, an opera with melodies based on American folk songs. It premiered at Indiana University in Bloomington and later was staged by a small opera company in New York City. It also aired on PBS television stations.

“ ‘Down in the Valley’ is a warm and gracious libretto,” said Miles Kreuger, president of the Institute of the American Musical in Beverly Hills, on Wednesday. Together, lyrics and music amount to “an enchanting folk opera,” he said.

Unlike stage productions about rural life that “sound like they were written by someone in Beverly Hills, sipping martinis,” Kreuger said, “ ‘Down in the Valley’ is a triumph of conviction.”

Sundgaard collaborated with Moore on several operas, including “Giants in the Earth,” a 1951 drama based on the novel by Norwegian writer O.E. Rolvaag about immigrants in Dakota Territory.

Collaborating with Wilder, who mixed jazz and classical elements in his music, Sundgaard wrote the libretto for the operas “The Lowland Sea” in 1953 and “Sunday Excursion” in 1955. Both opened in regional venues.

He had a brush with controversy in 1938 when his play “Spirochete” was produced by the Federal Theatre Project in Chicago. One in a series of plays in the company’s Living Newspapers series, the play’s subject was the dangers of syphilis.

Public protests greeted the play when it opened in Philadelphia because “syphilis was not talked about at the time,” Joy Kaiser said this week. But ticket sales and critics’ reviews were good.

In the 1950s, Sundgaard worked on several episodes of “Omnibus,” a popular television program.

For one show, about the Civil War, he came across the song “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” which had been all but forgotten. The song was included in the “Omnibus” program in 1955 and was recorded by Mitch Miller, his orchestra and chorus. That year it held the No. 1 spot on the Billboard chart for six weeks.

Several of Sundgaard’s dramatic works played on Broadway, but for a short run. Among them was “Of Love Remembered,” directed by Burgess Meredith, which opened and closed in February 1967.

He also wrote children’s books. The most popular, “The Lamb and the Butterfly” (1988), includes illustrations by Eric Carle.

For more than 30 years starting in the mid-1940s, Sundgaard taught at Columbia University in New York City, Bennington College in Vermont and several other colleges and universities.

Sundgaard was born Oct. 31, 1909, in St. Paul, Minn., and graduated from the University of Wisconsin. He married Margaret Christensen in 1929. They had two children before their marriage ended in divorce. He married Marge Kane in 1940. The couple had two sons.

He is survived by a sister, one son and two daughters as well as grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

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