Man's Fate

Postwar European opera has shown fascinating diversity of subject matter. Trying to put new drama onto their old stages, composers and librettists have turned to Kafka's tales of man in the grip of faceless forces (Gottfried von Einem's The Trial); to religion (Francis Poulenc's The Dialogues of the Carmelites); to intellectual battles of the past (Paul Hindemith's The Harmony of the World, an opera about the astronomer Kepler). Last week two more noteworthy operas held the stage in East Berlin and Naples. Both are by veterans: Slovakian-born Composer Eugen Suchon, 49, and Italian Composer Renzo Rossellini, 50 (sometime music critic and brother of Film Director Roberto Rossellini). Both works are coincidentally and aptly titled The Vortex, but the conflicts they describe are significantly different. While the Czechoslovakian Vortex shows man at war with himself and his dark passions, the Italian Vortex shows man in a death struggle with the steel-cold state.

After Bartok. Suchon's work was premiered in 1949, but was rarely seen by Western critics until its production this month at East Berlin's State Opera. It will be staged in Belgrade, Budapest, and in the Soviet Union, eventually may find its way West. The opera's plot concerns the trials of a Slovakian peasant girl named Katrena whose lover is found murdered in a forest clearing. At first suspected, Katrena is later cleared and promptly marries an earlier suitor named Ondrej. When she bears a child ahead of schedule, Ondrej flies into a jealous rage, reveals in a drunken soliloquy that he is the murderer, later confesses publicly. Katrena retires with her bastard child to live with old Stelina, father of her lover, and the chorus, as commentator on the action, concludes that "life sings of joy and sorrow."

Composer Suchon, who also worked on the libretto, fleshed the bare bones of his plot with some moving psychological insights. The libretto was admirably supplemented by Suchon's muscular score, which reminded the enthusiastic audience of the music of Czechoslovakia's Leos (Jenufa) Janacek and Hungary's Bela Bartok. Strongly rhythmic, it combined rich Slovakian folk flavor with pungently powerful orchestration. In Katrena's lament over her fate, strikingly sung by Soprano Anny Schlemm, and in Ondrej's affecting admission of guilt, Suchon provided crowd-rousing vocal high points that might well place The Vortex in the standard operatic literature.

After Puccini. Composer Rossellini's Vortex, for which he wrote the libretto as well as the music, takes place in an unidentified "city of Central Europe" where factory workers are engaged in a hopeless revolt against the oppressive power of the state. Anna, the heroine (Soprano Clara Petrella), has lost her husband in the revolt, is separated from her children and her old friend Renato (Tenor Ferrando Fegrari). Anna escapes the soldiers assigned to crush the revolt, is briefly reunited with Renato, who becomes her lover. She tries to flee with him to America, but is arrested and shot down when she attempts to escape from a police station. "Love," concludes Composer Rossellini, "is the only thing the vortex [of modern society] can never sweep away."

The scores of Composers Rossellini and Suchon are as different as Italy's olive-colored hills and Slovakia's heavily forested mountains. The critics promptly dubbed Rossellini a rival to Gian Carlo Menotti as the "modern Puccini," and with some justice. His rousing score was in the honored melodic tradition of Italian opera. It was laced through with sentimental arias that were in sharp contrast to the dramatic, agitated music accompanying the plot's trench-coated cops and hip-swinging prostitutes. In last week's performance at Naples' San Carlo Opera House, Soprano Petrella moved the audience with two lush arias: O Dio! and her deathbed song, Vedete figli miei, sono venuta (Look, my children, I have come). Rossellini's Vortex proved among other things that--no matter how somber the libretto--Italian composers do not find it easy to look through life's glass darkly.

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