Giants in Tableau

Douglas Moore usually composes one opera every seven years; to get enough time, he has to wait for his sabbatical leave as chairman of the music department of Columbia University.

On his first leave in 1935, he wrote White Wings (based on the play by Philip Barry); he managed the musical score for Stephen Vincent Benet's The Devil and Daniel Webster in a summer only because it was short and could be dashed off in a few months. On his second sabbatical, in 1942, he picked a libretto that "wouldn't work" and "missed the boat." He wrote a Quintet and some songs instead. Last week audiences in Columbia's Brander Matthews Hall saw and heard what good, grey Douglas Moore, 57, had cooked up on his third sabbatical.

A composer with a predilection for American subjects, Moore chose a hard story of Norwegian pioneers in Dakota Territory. Arnold (Down in the Valley) Sundgaard carved a three-act libretto from Norwegian-born Novelist O. E. Rolvaag's Giants in the Earth.

As produced by Columbia's Opera Workshop, Giants in the Earth came off as something less than a giant of the stage. There was quality to it. Composer Moore's tuneful and tonal music had authentic American flavor and a good opera's share of excitement and tension. Where it let down was in sharp delineation of character; unhappily, that was just where Sundgaard's libretto let down too.

The opera's central character (Beret), a "fine sensitive woman" who cracks up from pioneering hardships, gets lost amidst homecomings, claim jumpings, a wedding, baptism and a final invasion of locusts. The result: Giants in the Earth totted up as more of a series of tableaux (or a bad western) than an opera.

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