How to Be a Queen

Manhattan-born Meyer Kupferman is a hefty six-footer who decided long ago that he could teach himself how to compose. Some of his work sounds as though was not too far wrong: when he was only 15, his impressionistic Woodwind

Sextet won him a "neat and charming" notice from Composer-Critic Virgil Thomson. Last week an After Dinner Opera Company audience in Manhattan heard 23-year-old Composer Kupferman teamed up with a late impressionist of the literary world--Gertrude Stein.

The result was a one-act opera as stylish, Steinish, charming and listenable as any summer audience could want to hear. Composer Kupferman had picked Author Stein's In a Garden (from The First Reader & Three Plays) for the libretto of his first opera. The story was sweet and simple--and so was the artfully naive music that went with it. A little girl (pertly played and sung by pretty 21-year-old Soprano Sylvia Stahlman) plays she is a queen:

I am thinking how to be a queen

I'm not thinking about how to be a princess

I am thinking about how to be a queen.

And I am thinking not about being

Lucy Willow

But how to be a queen . . .

Two little boys, in pot & pan armor, duel with wooden spoons for the right to be her king. When both of them are finally stretched out on the floor dead, little Lucy Willow sighs and sings Author Stein's closing lines:

I can tell by feeling,

I am a queen

And it is lovely to be a queen.

So far as many a listener was concerned, budding Composer Kupferman, a man with a freshening sense of melody, could climb right up near Composer-Critic Thomson (Four Saints in Three Acts, The Mother of Us All) when it came to setting Stein to song.

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