Man Without a Country

Philip Nolan was a shady horse dealer from Louisiana who was shot in 1801 by the Spaniards he had cheated. Edward Everett Hale was a Boston minister who helped whip up Union sentiment during the Civil War. When politicians like Clement Vallandigham of Ohio began to recommend separatism, Dr. Hale wrote The Man Without a Country as an object lesson. Dr. Hale named his hero Philip Nolan, built around him a story of treason and punishment so detailed that it sounded true. In the story Nolan is arrested for plotting with Aaron Burr to found a kingdom in the Southwest. At his trial he exclaims, "Damn the United States! I wish I may never hear of the United States again!", is therefor sentenced to perpetual imprisonment at sea with no word from home. Like Uncle Tom's Cabin, Hale's short story continued to be read long after its immediate purpose was forgotten. More than half a million copies were printed in the U. S. and England. It was translated into Spanish and printed in Peru to stir patriotism in war against Chile. Succeeding generations saw The Man Without a Country done on the stage and screen. Last week a fashionable Manhattan audience was first to see it done as an opera.

Since it was the first novelty in the Metropolitan spring season, The Man Without a Country was bound to be well attended. Interest was doubled by the fact that it was the collaboration of two famed and well-loved U. S. oldsters, one 75, the other 65. Walter Damrosch wrote the music, Arthur Guiterman the libretto.

Composer Damrosch began to conduct the New York Symphony and Oratorio Societies 50 years ago, kept the former until 1927, year before it merged with the Philharmonic, founded the Damrosch Opera Company and made $53,000 the first season. He made himself nationally famous by his lectures on Wagner, is still active with a children's music hour on the radio. Arthur Guiterman, whose verses in oldtime Life and elsewhere were for a generation as much of a U. S. landmark as the drawings of Charles Dana Gibson, still publishes skittish poems, but has in recent years tried more serious verse. Death and General Putnam--and 101 Other Poems (1935), his literary high, was boosted by many readers for a Pulitzer Prize. He is an expert on New York history, rich enough to winter in Florida, summer in Vermont.

Last week neither Damrosch's music nor Guiterman's libretto could make their two-act opera entirely successful. Ignoring the possibilities of a rip-snorting plot, the score abounded in old turns and phrases, was at its best when it borrowed obviously from Wagner. Set songs were brought off skilfully but they often sounded banal. The text was happy, fitted the music better than most U. S. operas permit. Since opera needs a soprano, Authors Damrosch & Guiterman interpolated a new character, Mary Rutledge, as Nolan's sweetheart. When Philip is tried by a military tribunal, she nervously wrings her hands in the back of the courtroom. When he is exiled, she follows him to Gibraltar. Boarding ship, Mary begs Stephen Decatur, who has Philip in custody, to let him command a gun against attacking pirates. Decatur gives in, a Berber battle song rings out, Mary makes her escape. In the fierce encounter that follows, Nolan is wounded, dies hearing Mary's imagined lullaby.

White-maned Walter Damrosch rehearsed and conducted his opera with great vigor, took curtain calls along with Poet Guiterman. In a cast that sang as freshly as any this season, particular credit went to Helen Traubel of St. Louis for a powerful-voiced Mary. Arthur Carron sang Philip expressively, looked so little the romantic part that forthright Critic Danton Walker of the Daily News felt his sentence of banishment should have been a bread-&-water diet.

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