Death in the Afternoon

Time: the present, a winter Sunday afternoon. Place: the living room of Tracy and Laura Gates, somewhere in Suburbia.

Laura: It's snowing again. [Tracy gets up and begins mixing himself a drink.] Already?

Tracy: Already . . . already what?

Laura: Last Sunday you began at 4 o'clock; today you begin at 3:45 . .

Tracy: Let's not forget your old man!

Laura: Not my old man, my father! He was a fine person too . . . well known in his profession . . .

Tracy: Well known as a West Hartford lush, you mean . . .

Laura: You can hold it, all right . . . Right there in that fat paunch of yours.

With this Tennessee Williams-toned opening scene, audiences at Tanglewood's Theater-Concert Hall were introduced last week to a new one-act trilingual opera entitled Tale for a Deaf Ear, by Manhattan Composer Mark Bucci (rhymes with kootchy). For the Gateses, things quickly go from bad to hideous; Laura tosses a glass of Scotch in Tracy's face, and Tracy, rising to slug her, falls to the floor, dead of a heart attack. A repentant Laura kneels and prays that he be restored to life. While a pit chorus explains what is going on, three legendary miracles are enacted at one side of the stage: an Italian Renaissance woman finds her dead child coming back to life, a Scottish lass sees her cow revive, and a German soldier of the Thirty Years' War exchanges his own life for that of his fallen brother. (Each of the episodes is sung in the language of its setting.) Then back to the living room. Tracy yawns, looks up at Laura and asks: "What the hell are you doing on your knees?''

Grateful for the miracle, Laura tries to change, but soon the old argument boils up again. Tracy dodges a flying ashtray, lifts his fist and drops dead again, this time permanently. While the doctor slips in and gives Laura a hypo, the chorus chants the moral: "The only death in life is the death of love."

The opera, based on an Elizabeth Enright story, almost jolted the overflow (1,300) audience out of their seats, left them applauding wildly. Composer Bucci's score was lushly melodic, reminiscent in the sweeping emotional climaxes of both Puccini and Menotti, and pricked by dissonances which underscored the shrill chatter of Laura and Tracy.

The son of a bassoonist (now with the Cleveland Symphony), Composer Bucci, 33, grew up "with a bassoon in my ear," resisted all family efforts to steer him away from music. He spent eight years in a Manhattan cold-water walk-up trying to learn to be a composer and being psychoanalyzed (his Tale suffers from pseudo-Freudian symbolism). Bucci failed to attract real attention until he set James Thurber's Thirteen Clocks to music for TV (TIME, Jan. 11, 1954). Says Director Boris Goldovsky of Tangle-wood's opera department: "Bucci provides something which we have missed with most modern composers. The trouble with them when they write something for voice is that they make their singers speak. This boy makes voices sing."

Another youthful New York composer with a gift for vocal writing, Marvin Levy, 25, had his latest opera premiered at the Santa Fe Opera's amphitheater (TIME, July 15). Composer Levy's work, a one-acter entitled The Tower, tells how King Solomon imprisons his daughter after a prophet predicts she will marry the poorest man in the kingdom. Joash, dead-broke, is thrown into the same prison, promptly marries the princess, and in the end is accepted by his father-in-law and decked in royal robes. The score, as frothy as the libretto, played heavily on the comic effects, e.g., King Solomon's staccato outbursts, and included some melodious arias which went down like whipped cream. The moral is sung by the prophet, who is young and just getting started in the business: "Whether we prognosticate/grief or joy/for love or hate/prophets sing the will of fate."

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