Baseball in Cold Blood

Composer William Schuman, 42, is president of Manhattan's Juilliard School of Music. He is also an ardent baseball fan (New York Giants) and the unofficial coach of the kids in & around his suburban New York home. It was practically inevitable that his two interests should meet, and last week they did. Schuman's The Mighty Casey, a baseball opera, had its world premiere in Hartford, Conn.

The operatic Casey is not the Yankees' Casey Stengel but the Mudville hero of Ernest L. Thayer's famed old rhetorical war horse, Casey at the Bat, which builds up to one of the biggest letdowns in all literature--Casey's strikeout with two men on and two out.

Librettist Jeremy Gury preserved the 13 stanzas of iambic heptameter intact, but also worked up a good deal of added story business besides two more stanzas. After a scene outside the Mudville ball park, in which he discloses a few previously unrevealed facts (Casey was a left-handed rightfielder with a batting average of .564), he takes the audience to a spot somewhere back of shortstop and puts the poetry into the mouth of a narrator.

As each stanza is declaimed, the entire cast freezes into a tintype tableau. Then everybody but Casey (Louis Venora), who is impressive but mute, bursts into songs of Schuman and Gury devising. Among them: a what-does-the-catcher-say-to-the-pitcher number, a kill-the-umpire rhubarb and, after the immortal third strike, a heartfelt requiem. But the piece ends on a happy note: Casey is still a hero to his girl. Musically, the opera was ingenious if not immortal--though at an hour and 20 minutes, it was about 20 minutes too long. Nonetheless, the Hartford audience seemed to like most of it, and gave the composer a rousing hand at the end.

Composer Schuman decided on his baseball theme "in cold blood," while searching his mind for an "American" subject. Unlike many a new opera, his Casey is scheduled to be performed again. Producer Alfred (The Voice oj the Turtle] de Liagre Jr. expects to give it its Broadway innings next season.

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