New Opera in Philadelphia

Music--serious music--is a profession which, to the helpless regret of music lovers as well as musicians, pays out in chicken feed. Thirty-one-year-old Paul Nordoff, angular, wirehaired, blond Philadelphian, has been better heeled than most young composers. He has won two Guggenheim fellowships worth about $4,500, took last year's $1,500 Pulitzer scholarship, is a teacher at the Philadelphia Conservatory. Composer Nordoff. who would have become a concert pianist had he not found that he was expected to study showy trash like Liszt's Mephisto Waltz, has written two piano concertos, a Whitmanesque Secular Mass, a Polynesian opera, the music for Katharine Cornell's production of Romeo and Juliet. Last week a Philadelphia production of a new one-act Nordoff opera, The Masterpiece, proved the most diverting event of a season in which the LT. S. lyric theatre had been taking a nice nap.

The Masterpiece was commissioned by Philadelphia's Academy of Vocal Arts, an up-&-coming outfit spark plugged by an energetic socialite, Mrs. Clarence A. Warden. The Academy paid Composer Nordoff all it could afford--$200--for 25 minutes of music, and he threw in a dozen extra minutes gratis. His tricky rhythms, his obstinate tunes might have stumped an even more experienced company, but the Academy singers--notably pretty Soprano Doris Blake--and a small orchestra under Conductor Vernon Hammond pulled into the final cadence without a grind or a bump. The Masterpiece (libretto by Franklin Brewer) told, with a few leers, about how an artist and his wife sell a picture to a dealer and his wife. Best of four set pieces:

Did Matisse find peace? Did Cezanne have a plan?

Is romance a release, or a drag on a man?

Did Braque feel a lack? Did Van Gogh ever know

What it means to hang back? I don't think so!

For without a little lapse, the monogamous relation,

Though unfortunate, perhaps, leads to ultimate frustration. . . .

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