Claudel Opera

Boos and hisses followed a performance at the Berlin Staatsoper one night last week. They were several times drowned out by bursts of applause, but by and large the boos had it at the premiere of an opera called Christopher Columbus.

Even if it had been the effort of unknowns, Christopher Columbus would still have provoked a lively reaction. It employed a medium new to opera: the moving picture. Columbus lived his outward life upon the stage--a tragic life lacking ultimate reward because the land he discovered was given the name of another. Simultaneously, somewhat in the manner of Playwright Eugene O'Neill's Strange Interlude* there were sometimes shown on the screen his inner thoughts, sometimes his past or future, sometimes the ridicule of others against which he had always to contend. The chorus, too, behaved oddly for a modern opera: stationed on wings which spread far into the audience, it sang from there its comments in the manner of the ancient Greek choruses.

But the Berlin reception was stimulated by more than a freakish operatic frame work. Christopher Columbus was written by two famed Frenchmen, by Poet Paul Claudel, Ambassador to the U. S., and Composer Darius Milhaud. Milhaud is also a onetime diplomat. Wartime Paris was a poor hunting-ground for young musicians. Many were forced to other means of livelihood and Milhaud, a prize Conservatory graduate, went to Brazil in 1917 as attache to the French legation there. In two years, however, he was back in Paris, leader of the Six/- whose modern musical renown grew from their union. For some critics even then Milhaud stood apart. Some professed to find a queer, shadowy beauty in his music. Others dismissed him as crude, trifling, freakish (he once set a florist's catalog to music for voice and chamber orchestra). Several important Berlin opinions sided with these last and with the ill-mannered boos which swept the Staatsoper after Christopher Columbus. The music was "thin," a "European scandal." All agreed that Claudel's play was the great contribution, that he at least had shown imagination.

*Characters in Strange Interlude spoke their thoughts in monotones easily distinguished from their actual conversation. /-The rest of the Six: Arthur Honegger, Germaine Tailleferre, Francis Poulenc, Georges Auric, Louis Durey.

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