Troubled Opera

In his 53 years, William Grant Still has had as much success with his symphonies, symphonic poems, ballets and chamber works as other U.S. composers (TIME, June 7) and certainly more than any other Negro composer. Nonetheless, he felt there was one unresolved dissonance. "All my life," says he, "my aim has been opera."

For twelve years, sometimes collaborating with his writer wife, Verna Arvey ("she takes over where I fail to function"), he has toiled away on the composition of seven operas. A slight, sloe-eyed man whose hobby is turning out toys for his two children, he even fashioned miniature sets for his operas in his Los Angeles home. Some of the operas he junked as not good enough, but he saved four. A few years ago, the Metropolitan turned down his favorite, Troubled Island, with a libretto by Negro Poet Langston Hughes, because it called for something the Met couldn't assemble from its own roster--a large number of Negroes among the supporting cast. Says Still: "I have been patient; others would have given up, but I have exercised an enormous amount of determination."

Emperor, Then Tyrant. Last week, Composer Still's determination paid off. He sat nervously but happily in an up-front orchestra seat while a sell-out New York City Opera Company audience saw the first performance of a Still opera.

The City Opera's energetic little Director Laszlo Halasz had pulled out all the stops to put on Troubled Island; he had Haitian Jean Leon Destine and his troupe to do the voodoo dances. He would have had to look far for a better baritone than the Met's burly Robert Weede to sing the lead role of Jean Jacques Dessalines, the Haitian slave who made himself (in 1804) an emperor, then a tyrant, only to be duped by his mistress and shot in the back. With Marie (The Medium) Powers as the rejected wife who came back faithfully to bury her husband, and George Balanchine to tune up a satirical little minuet, Troubled Island should have had no trouble at all.

Children of Misery. But it did. Poet Hughes's libretto turned out to have far more peroration ("Children of misery, tomorrow we must be free," etc.) than punch. And Composer Still's music, sometimes lusciously scored, sometimes naively melodic, often had more prettiness than power. In all, Troubled Island had more of the 'souffle of operetta than the soup bone of opera. With a little seasoning here & there, some listeners thought, it could even be made into a Broadway hit. Composer Still's first-night audience liked it fine, anyhow. Exultant, happy, and even more determined after taking six curtain calls with the cast, Still said he planned to keep on trying to write grand opera. Said he: "You don't realize your mistakes until they stare you in the face. I discovered my weak points."

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