Henry James in Song

"The idea, reduced to its essence, is that of a young person conscious of a great capacity for life, but early stricken and doomed, condemned to die under short respite." Thus Henry James tried to cut through the psychological brambles of his own Wings of the Dove. Last week Manhattan operagoers saw an attempt to render the Jamesian complexities in song: the New York City Opera premiere of Composer Douglas Moore's The Wings of the Dove.

The novel gets much of its quality from the convoluted Jamesian style, which is hardly suited to song. Still, Composer Moore ( The Devil and Daniel Webster, The Ballad of Baby Doe) was fascinated by the story of a young Englishwoman who urges her penniless lover to start a flirtation with an ailing American heiress, hoping that the heiress, who is compared in the story to a dove, will soon die and leave him rich and free. In stripping the story to the operatic bone, Moore and Librettist Ethan Aver changed the name of the scheming suitor from Merton Densher to Miles Dunster (because, says Moore, ''the name Densher could not be enunciated today without a ribald response"), and they gave the opera an extra twist by making Densher announce, after the death of the heiress, that he no longer loves his covetous mistress, Kate Croy. At opera's end, lonely Kate wraps herself in a white shawl that once belonged to the heiress, Milly Theale--the wings of the dove still divide the plotters.

To catch the Jamesian spirit, Composer Moore, 68, wrote a score that has none of the folksy American flavor of Baby Doe or Daniel Webster. It surges forward with a propulsive flow that rarely stops for set pieces or arias. The opera is also highly melodic, most effectively in Milly's Dove Song, which soars over ribbons of strings, and in a fine female duet ("He will, he must He'll be coming back" ) toward the end. For all that, Wings of the Dove suffers from a case of dramatic anemia. Composer Moore does his best to summon drama where no drama exists, but the assignment is hopeless. In its succession of empty climaxes, the score loses almost all its tension. James's novel, the opera demonstrates once more, is best left to its own complexities.

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