Old Cross

My old man's a white old man

And my old mother's black . . .

My old man died in a fine big house.

My ma died in a shack.

I wonder where I'm gonna die,

Being neither white nor black.

Negro Poet Langston Hughes seldom wrote anything more simple and effective than his poem Cross. Some people liked it so well that he turned it into a play, Mulatto, and it ran on Broadway for more than a year in 1935-36. Two years ago, when German-born Composer Jan Meyerowitz, of the Berkshire Music Center, asked him for a modern opera libretto, Poet Hughes reached for his Cross again. Last week audiences at Columbia University's Brander Matthews Hall heard the two-act result, The Barrier.

The Barrier, they found, packed both plot and punch. The only question was whether the story, in being supercharged up from poem size, hadn't been punched entirely too much for successful music-drama.

In the Hughes libretto, Bert, mulatto son of a white plantation owner and a Negro housekeeper, puts his white half forward after he comes home from World War II. He begins mildly enough; he just drinks his Coke in the drugstore like anybody else, instead of taking it out back.

Then he defies his father, Colonel Norwood, by entering the big house by the front door. When his outraged father (Baritone Paul Elmer) threatens him with a gun, Bert strangles the old sinner before he can fire a shot. After that, the only thing left for Bert is to shoot himself before the libretto lynching party catches up with him.

Composer Meyerowitz had done his best to keep up with the fast-moving plot. The singers, particularly little Negro Soprano Muriel (Carmen Jones) Rahn, who played the part of the housekeeper, did their best with the difficult intervals in his arias. But for most of the evening, the best the Stravinsky-model music achieved was the role of a first-class sound-track accompaniment. Poet Hughes's story could always manage without the music; but the music, for all the exciting quality that Composer Meyerowitz had given it, needed company.

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