Romantic Modernist

Leonard Kastle is a composer who likes romantic music, romantic themes and good old-fashioned melody. He is, in short, a musical square. But Kastle is a gifted composer of song cycles and choral works, and a man with ideas about opera. This week Composer Kastle and his ideas re ceived a nationwide airing: in a two-hour telecast the NBC-TV Opera gave Deseret, the first work to be given its premiere on the show since Stanley Hollingsworth's La Grande Breteche four years ago.

Deseret derives its title from the state established by Brigham Young and his Mormons in the Salt Lake Valley in 1847.

The libretto (by TV Writer Anne Howard Bailey) is a variation on an incident from Young's life: a young girl brought to him to become his 25th and last wife falls in love instead with a non-Mormon Union Army officer; in a sacrificial gesture Young renounces his claim on her and sends her forth from Deseret to marry the man she loves. In a somewhat overwrought revelation, Young sees the lovers' departure as an omen of the day when "Deseret too will go out into the great world . . ." Composer Kastle provided a surgingly lyrical score admirably suited to the moods of the text. One of its high points was a rhapsodic duet between the heroine, expertly portrayed by Soprano Judith Raskin, and the officer ("No rival heart/ No rival wife/ Will come/ Between our flesh/ Our love"). Other standouts: a triumphant final sextet celebrating the "lesson of love," and the heroine's sprightly address to a mirror to variations of Come, Come, Ye Saints. The opera's weakness is its sameness of tone, its tendency to pile layer upon layer of melody, its failure to etch a real musical profile. Deseret has the musical makings for half a dozen operas but the ideas for scarcely one.

New York-born Composer Kastle, 31, wrote his first opera (about a stuffed alligator in a storm) when he was six. The son of a textile merchant, he attended Juilliard, every Saturday afternoon trudged up to the balcony of the Metropolitan Opera to listen to how the professionals did it. Although he has been composing vocal works ever since his Curtis Institute days, Kastle attempted only one adult opera before Deseret--a one-acter titled The Swing, having to do with a bride's premarital jitters. He is now at work on another opera on an American theme, laid in the 1700s. Like his other efforts, it will be resolutely melodic. "I have always felt free," says he, "to use a C major chord when I want it."

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