Man-About-Music

The pudgy little man in smoothly fitted tails put down his baton, turned to the audience and inclined his balding head to the salvos of applause. That was in his native Jackson, Miss., where last week he conducted the stage premiere of his opera The Soldier plus his Malady of Love for a two-night stand. The next night, in black tie, he turned up in the pit of Manhattan's Lunt-Fontanne Theater, where he presided over a performance of Leroy Anderson's brassy musical Goldilocks. Four days later, in a sweatshirt, he was hovering over the orchestra that accompanied Rosalind Russell and cast in a two-hour production of Wonderful Town (see SHOW BUSINESS). The determined gadabout: Broadway Composer-Conductor Lehman Engel, 48, one of the nation's busiest and most versatile men-about-music.

Belt of the Muse. In moments of introspection Musician Engel thinks of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. "That genius," he says, "wrote to order. He had no time for the muse to belt him." If the muse has failed to lay a glove on Engel, it is chiefly because he moves too fast. He has presided over the pit orchestras of roughly 130 Broadway productions, headed an esoteric organization called the Madrigal Singers, written reams of articles and a bag of books, including a five-volume study of European music entitled Renaissance to Baroque.

His own opera scores, as last week's Jackson performances demonstrated, are tautly constructed, neatly professional jobs, full of garish dramatic effects. The Soldier, based on a story by Roald Dahl, is a moody study of a World War II veteran who returns home psychologically scarred, suspects his wife of trying to drive him insane, and eventually winds up in a mental institution. To this curdled tale Composer Engel fitted a score shot through with warm lyrical flights that died suddenly in derisively dissonant evocations of the chaos in the soldier's mind. Engel's fellow Jacksonians responded enthusiastically, and the mayor expressed the city's official gratitude by proclaiming the days of the performances to be "Lehman Engel Days."

Arrival by Fluke. Composer Engel started his first opera, Alfred, when he was ten ("I spent a great deal of time block-lettering the title at the top of the score"), eventually won a graduate scholarship to Juilliard, studied composition with craggy Modernist Roger Sessions. He arrived on Broadway "purely by fluke" when he persuaded Melvyn Douglas to let him write new incidental music for a Broadway production of Sean O'Casey's Within the Gates. That was in 1934, and since then Composer-Conductor Engel has had a hand in such diverse Broadway shows as Maurice Evans' Hamlet, The Trojan Women, A Streetcar Named Desire (for which he wrote incidental music), The Consul and Li'l Abner (for which he served as pit conductor).

He has also turned out dozens of show albums for the major record companies. In addition, he has built a fine reputation as an interpreter of baroque music, which he claims to understand intuitively because of his experience in "living theater." Currently, he is planning an operetta based on Chekhov's The Boor, recording albums of Broadway overtures (for Columbia), Broadway ballets (for RCA Victor), writing an autobiographical survey of the U.S. musical scene. His breathless commuting between composing and conducting, Broadway and highbrow, has earned him, in some quarters, the affectionate handle of "the Poor Man's Lenny Bernstein." What makes Lehman run? "I like to live well," says Bachelor Engel candidly. "I like to eat and I like to drink. The sad truth is I have to work to do both."

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