For the People

In Manhattan last week the American Lyric Theatre entered the second week of its debutante season. First week, it had launched the folksy opera, The Devil and Daniel Webster, by Douglas Moore and Stephen Vincent Benet. This it followed with an operetta based upon Stephen Foster tunes, Susanna Don't You Cry, which, for all its musical charm and its flashy mounting by Robert Edmond Jones, had a plot which died of Southern molassitude. The Lyric Theatre next put on an evening of dancing by Lincoln Kirstein's Ballet Caravan--an uninspired Air and Variations to music by Bach; an arty cigar-store Indian Pocahontas (Elliott Carter Jr.); a rich, loamy piece of Americana, Billy the Kid (Aaron Copland).

Susanna made the Lyric Theatre's repertory because a Fosterphile, Josiah Kirby Lilly of the Indianapolis druggist Lillys, had backed it to the tune of $50,000. Last week, just about the time the mutual backscratching was over, the Lyric Theatre noticed it had three flops on its hands. It closed its season after a dozen performances, announced it would send The Devil on the road in the autumn, open a second season with some new tries.

If U. S. culture was not much enriched by the Lyric Theatre last week, the reputation of Composer Copland was. His music for the "character-ballet" Billy the Kid, much of it based on cowboy songs, was close-knit, percussive, incisive, wasting not a grace note in its evocation of the dapper, New York-born killer who flourished in the Southwest in the '703 and '80s. The choreography of Eugene Loring and the dancing of the Ballet Caravan were no less exciting.

Aaron Copland (pronounced Copeland), 39, is the youngest son of a Brooklyn storekeeper who thought his name was Kaplan, until an immigration official wrote it to suit his own ears. Copland is tall, energetic, large-nosed, engagingly toothy. He began studying music at 13. In the early 19205, as a student at Fontainebleau (first pupil of famed Nadia Boulanger), he was a highbrow Gershwin, wading in the shallow stream of jazz. Then he plunged into the acid eddies of dissonance and atonality, emerged with the reputation of being one of the least understandable of U. S. musicians. Today, Copland has begun writing music for the people, for as large an audience as possible, "to get rid of the idea that American music is a weak sister."

Billy the Kid was compelling testimony to that aim. Last week Composer Copland had another. In his first cinema music, for the documentary film The City (see p. 66), he wrote a score which well expressed the calm of a New England village, the bustle of a big city, the well-being of a model town. At the New York World's Fair, he had another: Copland tunes t accompanied giant puppets in the Hall of Pharmacy. And, although they never got to Broadway, the Mercury Theatre's Five Kings and the Group Theatre's Quiet City were provided with Copland scores.

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