Opera in the Idiom

Jacques Wolfe, 55, composer of such famed songs as Shortnin' Bread, Glory Road, and Gwine to Hebb'n, is a man with strong feelings about "real American opera." He is convinced that it won't develop until a lot of traditional "operatic hogwash" goes down the drain. His prediction: American opera will settle in a style "somewhere between Porgy and Bess and South Pacific. Let's face it, the popular song is the American idiom." Last week Rumanian-born Composer Wolfe was illustrating his point in a theater off Broadway with a little production called Mississippi Legend.

Wolfe based his story on Novelist Roark Bradford's John Henry, the saga of a Negro Paul Bunyan. In 1936, Wolfe had written incidental music for a play based on John Henry (starring Paul Robeson), but the play flopped. For his first opera, he picked up some of the best of his old music, wrote much that was new.

What his audiences got was a Mississippi Legend that mostly just kept rollin' along, smoothly and inevitably, but with few flash floods of emotion. Well sung by a Village Opera Company cast and chorus (no orchestra), Legend had its chief charm in its authentic blues. It was in the American idiom all right, but the score was all warp and no woof. Wolfe strung his ballads along one after the other, unadorned and undeveloped, with few bars to bind them together.

Composer Wolfe planned it that way. "After all," he says, "you can't have John Henry rolling cotton to a fugue."

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