Wrestling on Merry Mount

Manhattan operagoers who are wailing this season because Deems Taylor's Peter Ibbetson has an imported libretto and music derived almost completely from the great Europeans (and is, at best, a mediocre work) will have opportunity next year to pass judgment on an opera more properly called "native."

The new work will be the fourteenth produced by the Metropolitan in its search for a lasting U. S. opera. Unlike most operas, this one was instigated by the librettist. Richard Leroy Stokes felt the creative urge when he was still writing sharp musical criticisms for the New York Evening World. He wrote a libretto in a combination of rhymed and unrhymed verse, dedicated it to his exotic-looking wife, then asked Director Howard Hanson of the Eastman School of Music in Rochester to write the music, please. Composer Hanson is now more than half done.

The piece is called Merry Mount and suggests the story of Thomas Morton, English adventurer who antagonized the Puritans by setting up a maypole and selling rum and arms to the Indians in what is now Quincy, Mass., lately famed for permitting Eugene O'Neill's Strange Interlude to be played there when Boston prohibited it.

Quincian forbears were not so tolerant as Quincians of today, and on this idea hangs the Stokes plot, details of which were revealed last week. The hero is Wrestling Bradford, a young Puritan clergyman darkly obsessed with the beauty of Lady Marigold, fiancee of gay Sir Gower Lackland. While Wrestling is wrestling with his soul, Sir Gower and his sinful kind are having one of their maypole dances on Merry Mount. Later Sir Gower is killed outright by a Puritan. The village is attacked by Indians and the love-distracted Wrestling accuses Lady Marigold of witchcraft. As she is about to be burned he picks her up in his arms, strides into the flames with her. In the Metropolitan's production the feat will not be difficult if, as now seems probable, big Lawrence Tibbett is Wrestling and chic Lucrezia Bori plays Lady Marigold.

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