Authoressed Opera

Few women have made a name in music as composers, fewer still as operatic composers. The only authoressed opera ever produced at the Metropolitan Opera House, Englishwoman Ethel Smyth's Der Wald, fizzled after two performances in 1903. But last week a onetime Metropolitan contralto-turned-composer was making a valiant try.

Back in 1910, when blonde, Pennsylvania-born Florence Wickham was singing Ortrud in Lohengrin and Emilia in Otello at the Met, she never thought of composing an opera herself. Twenty-five years later, long after she had married and retired, she wrote a musical adaptation of As You Like It. Sponsored by her friend, Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, it was produced in tiny Carmel, N.Y., later put on in Germany.

Two years ago, visiting her native Pennsylvania, Composer Wickham got the idea of writing an opera about the Amish and their hexes. There was a hill known as Hex Mountain; why not have it inhabited by an operatic hexer? She spent three months researching, two months writing her libretto and composing her score.

Last week an audience in Plymouth (Mass.) Memorial Hall saw the world premiere of Florence Wickham's The Legend of Hex Mountain. The legend: if the witch Hexi uses her black powers to save a human life, she loses them. But when her son gets in a jam, is threatened with death by the infuriated Amish townspeople, mother love triumphs. She saves him, is threatened with burning at the stake herself. Before that can happen, there is a flash of dazzling light and the ragged hag emerges in shining white, a new woman. She leaves the village for a new life with her son, and the wedding he has disrupted is rescheduled.

Composer Wickham had rounded up some old friends, retired Met Bass Leon Rothier and the Met's veteran Hansel and Gretel witch, Dorothee Manski, and some new stars, including Soprano Evelyn (The Medium) Keller, to help put her Hex over. Unhappily, she had failed to decide exactly what kind of music they should all sing. To many a mystified listener, Hex sounded like Faust one moment, Friml's Rose Marie another.

The applause for Hex did not indicate that the opera had stirred up a cyclone. One elderly lady remarked to her companion as they departed: "Well, it was different."

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