Five Operas

Chances for professional opera singers in the U.S. may be slim (see above), but for students in springtime they blossom like daffodils. Last week three U.S. schools offered five modern operas, composed by faculty members and a graduate student and staged by the schools' opera workshops. All of them were in a conservative idiom, ranging in style from Gilbert & Sullivan to Menotti. The five:

The Birthday of the Infanta, by Ron Nelson, 29, graduate student at Rochester's Eastman School of Music, and composer of promotional-film sound tracks. Following Oscar Wilde's story, a dwarf falls in love with a Spanish princess and persuades her to set up her throne in the forest. The scheme is frustrated by the captain of the guard, and tragedy closes in. The music reminded listeners of both Puccini and Menotti, and suggested that Birthday will have many happy returns.

The Rope, by Louis Mennini, 35, Eastman faculty member and brother of Manhattan Composer Peter Mennin. The plot is based on a one-act play by Eugene O'Neill. An old miser dangles a noose from a barn rafter, hoping his son will hang himself. Instead, the son decides to torture the miser into revealing his money's hiding place. Composer Mennini spent a summer learning the ins and outs of opera composition at Tanglewood, and used his knowledge well. The rub was the music; it seemed too charmingly melodious for the gruesome plot.

Beyond Belief, by Thomas Canning, 45, Eastman faculty member and composer of lots of gay, light music. This one is a fantastic satire of the atomic age and all its perils. A group of grey professors discovers the "key to consciousness," which permits knowledge of the past and future. The problem, complicated by young love, is whether to keep the discovery secret or turn it over to the authorities. Instrumentalists were seated in niches around the stage and played frothy music as the performers spoke and sang.

The Land Between the Rivers, by Indiana University's Associate Professor Carl Van Buskirk, 49. The story is adapted from a poem by Yale's Novelist-Professor Robert Penn Warren (All the King's Men). It tells of a roistering, 19th century innkeeper on the Cumberland River whose pleasure it is to lead travelers to his spring and then kill and rob them. His son escapes, returns in Act II (twelve years later) unrecognized, and allows himself to die under his father's hatchet. Composer Van Buskirk, who composed his score on piano and tape recorder, gave the orchestra a plaintive parlor-organ quality and the singers some striking dramatic climaxes.

Pantaloon, by Manhattan's Robert Ward, 39, assistant to the president of Juilliard School of Music. The plot adapted from He Who Gets Slapped by Russian Symbolist Leonid Andreyev, concerns a disturbed fellow who joins a circus as a clown for deep-seated reasons of his own. Composer Ward's music resembles Mascagni's, with thick textures sweeping strings and sweet harmonies and thus Pantaloon has the makings of a successful theater piece. Unfortunately, the drama does not need, or benefit from, the addition of music.

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