Big Book, Big Song

No successful opera can su'Ter a theatrically weak book, but a really strong book can be a big problem; it threatens to overpower the music. Last week the New York City Opera presented its second Ford Foundation-supported opera of the season--Cleveland-born Composer Robert Ward's The Crucible, based on Arthur Miller's powerful play (first produced on Broadway in 1953). For the most part, score met text on equal terms, producing that rare and hoped-for result: an opera charged with tension.

The Crucible, built on the Salem witch trials, deals with the conscience of a community stirred to a storm of hatred and terror by the sexual fantasies of Abigail Williams, a wanton teen-age Pilgrim ("Come to me now," she sings, "as you came before, like some great stallion wildly pantin' "). Ward, expertly assisted by Librettist Bernard Stambler, retained the shape of the Miller play almost intact--and also much of the language.

No modernist. Composer Ward, 44, turned out an orchestral score that holds few surprises; occasionally it is clamorously obvious, but at its best it admirably illuminates the singers' moods. The main strength of the score is in the vocal parts --vigorous, resourceful, utilizing melody as a dramatic weapon. Among the high points: the soaring hymn, Jesus, My Consolation, in which the town's elders celebrate the breaking of "Lucifer's bond," while in the loft above them Abigail joins in with her own acerbic, ironic cry of joy: I Open to Thee, O Jesus.

Composer Ward, who earns his living as the editor of a music publishing house, has written four symphonies, a number of songs and chamber pieces, and one other opera--He Who Gets Slapped, based on the play by Leonid Andreyev. He wrote The Crucible in one year, in the study of his 14-room house in Nyack, N.Y., and just finished in time. As curtain time approached, he was feeding the score to the singers five pages at a clip. The time is ripe for good opera, Ward believes, but he deplores the tendency--exemplified in Alban Berg's Wozzeck--to shift the dramatic emphasis from singers to orchestra. "Everything must happen in the voice," says Ward. "Opera belongs on the stage, not in the orchestra pit."

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