Grass-Roots Grand Opera

U.S. radio, with all its cultural failures, can boast of one proud accomplishment: it has greatly widened the audience for good music. Television may be doing the same thing for opera. The tried & true arias have long been popular favorites on such TV variety programs as Your Show of Shows and Toast of the Town. The NBC network pioneered in producing such TV-sized operas as Menotti's Amahl and the Night Visitors and Martinu's The Marriage. In Manhattan, independent station WPIX has been telecasting Opera Cameos for the past three years, complete with a sponsor (Progresso Brand Quality Foods) and a ready-made audience of opera lovers.

Louisville's station WAVE-TV is now proving that there is also a large grassroots audience ready and waiting for TV opera. In cooperation with the University of Louisville School of Music, WAVE-TV is telecasting 30-minute condensations of such favorites as La Boheme, Traviata and Hansel and Gretel. All of the operas are sung in English; the casts are made up of local housewives, radio performers and music students. The station supplies free scenery, costumes and technicians, while Director Moritz Bomhard and his staff come from the university. Says Bomhard: "The cost is so low I don't like to mention it."

By discarding all subplots, Bomhard is able to tell the story of each opera in 30 minutes. He pays as much attention to the acting and sets as to the singing ("Opera must not only be good music, but also good theater"). Station WAVE-TV gets an encouraging mail response from its TV audience. Better still, no one has complained that he would rather have hillbilly music or western movies. Bomhard hopes to be back this fall with his second series. He" also hopes that other stations throughout the nation will take the plunge into opera, because "it's unhealthy to have everything centralized in New York."

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