The Singing Greeks

When he was 14, Playwright Thornton Wilder knew his life's ambition. He wanted to be a composer of operas. He never quite made it, but 50 years later, at 64, Wilder is becoming a handy man-about-the-opera-house: his one-act play The Long Christmas Dinner recently provided the libretto for an opera by Composer Paul Hindemith (TIME, Dec. 29). Now his play The Alcestiad has furnished the Frankfurt Opera with an engaging and unexpected hit of the same name.

The composer is Louise Talma, 55, a longtime teacher of composition at New York City's Hunter College, who is well regarded for her small body of works (including two piano sonatas, a string quartet, Toccata for orchestra, the oratorio The Divine Flame). Chances are that Music Lover Wilder would never have collaborated with her had he not heard her Alleluia in form of Toccata at a piano recital in New Haven more than ten years ago. Later, when Talma heard Wilder read his Alcestiad at a private party, she "began to hear the music of the opera even while he was reading."

Wilder set to work on a libretto, keeping one principle in mind: "When you're writing a libretto the first thing to pay attention to is open vowels. Listen to those vowels in Measure for Measure, 'Take, O take those lips away'--but the art has almost died out.'' Wilder revived the art so successfully that Talma did not have to ask him to make a single change in the free-verse dialogue. She did, however, have to prune the German version of the libretto prepared for the Frankfurt Opera by Translator Herberth Herlitschka. Among the original Wilder lines that Talma particularly admired for their singable quality: "Send me the sign I have waited for/ Call me, call me."

The Alcestiad is Wilder's retelling of the Greek legend of Alcestis, whose devotion to her husband caused her to offer her life for his. Talma's score, which frequently employed the twelve-tone row, was aglow with curving lyric lines but avoided any hint of romantic lushness, was sometimes reminiscent of Stravinsky. The lightly modern music at no point obscured the text, at many points sharply illuminated it, as in a moving second-act farewell duet of Alcestis (well sung by Soprano Inge Borkh) and Admetus.

At opera's end, bespectacled Composer Talma took her bows while the audience shouted, "Louise, Louise!" Though it came as no shock to an audience accustomed to Berg and Henze, the score nevertheless surprised and delighted some listeners who had not expected, in the words of one German critic, to find "an American lady of Miss Talma's generation writing music more modern than Hindemith."

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