A Banal Savage

The critics were downright disgusted when Gian Carlo Menotti's new opera buffa was first performed in Paris last October. Le Dernier Sauvage had a libretto the French found far from funny, and its music they found distressingly short on substance. "A misery," said Le Figaro. But the Paris production was starved and skimpy, and Menotti's countless champions comforted themselves in the faith that The Last Savage would find a happier habitat in New York. Last week the Savage arrived at the Met in a production so beautiful that Menotti cheerfully conceded he would have no excuse if it failed. It did, and he hasn't.

Parties & Pants. Merely to be believed, the Savage requires a better-natured audience than a composer can expect to find in all Christendom. Attempting "smiling satire," Menotti has a Vassar girl (Roberta Peters) go to India in search of the Abominable Snowman. Her father (Morley Meredith) meets a maharajah and arranges a marriage of convenience between his daughter and the maharajah's son (Nicolai Gedda). But the girl is an anthropologist, and she insists upon her savage. Her father offers a peasant (George London) $100,000 to play the role, and the ersatz savage allows himself to be packed off to Chicago.

All the vanities of North Shore existence are exposed by the horrified savage--action painting and splintered Christianity, electro-dodecaphonic music and beat poetry, capri pants and cocktail parties. The peasant-savage finally flees to the jungle, having become a no-nonsense savage in the crucible of crumbling society. The girl follows on the wings of love: "Now my unquiet heart is at ease," she sings. "Nothing remains but ourselves and the trees." They seal their defection with a kiss--as native bearers carry the appliances of the fat life into their cave.

All this had little of "the pleasure of sweetness" that Menotti intended. A month of rehearsals under the sure hand of Thomas Schippers, excellent performances by Peters, Meredith and London, some last-minute opera-doctoring by Menotti, sets and costumes by Beni Montresor that looked like a world perceived inside a crystal Easter egg--nothing could rescue the Savage from its basic banality.

Fool & School. Menotti moves through music like a troop ship avoiding U-boats--back and forth, in and out. He darts from failure (Labyrinth) to triumph (The Death of the Bishop of Brindisi) with great agility, but nothing he has written since 1955 can approach the genius of The Saint of Bleecker Street or even The Consul. Aside from one or two pleasant arias and one superb septet, there is very little in the Savage that suggests its composer's grand reputation. The music could have been written any time after 1850, and the libretto could have been improved by almost anyone with 15 minutes and a pencil. "I would look like a fool, I have never been to school" constitutes a rhyme, but it is a rhyme Menotti shares with the composer of a pop song called Stupid Cupid that was big last year.

An excuse or two remains. The libretto was a translation from Menotti's Italian (but since his English is good enough to charm flowers into bloom, it is a puzzle why he put up with such a poor job). Menotti is simply not glib enough to be much of a humorist; he suffers a naivete that is a virtue as well as a vice. He is a man who is truly touched by life. As his past masterworks nobly demonstrate, a passion for the world can be as much a blessing to the composer as in this case it is a disaster to the comedian.

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