The Bland Giant

Roger Sessions has a solid reputation. He is known everywhere as a "distinguished" or "major" composer. The only trouble is that his music is seldom performed. His profound and satanically difficult works are all greatly admired by critics, but audiences rarely seem eager to hear them. His violin concerto waited 24 years for its first New York performance, and in the season just ending, only one of the nation's top four orchestras played a work by Sessions. At 67, he has endured 50 winters in music without any springtimes. His problem, quite simply, is that he cannot catch the ear.

Giant Step. Sessions keeps working. Last week he was in Berlin to hear his magnum opus, the opera Montezuma, in a premiere that was, ironically, pronounced a giant step forward in American music.*The first-night curtain at the Deutsche Oper fell on a somewhat bland performance, but two more renditions gave the intense, three-hour tragic work an emotional power and variety that its first appearance lacked. And still the response was disappointing.

Sessions' chronic distance from his listeners was more severe than usual in Berlin, since the audience showed up expecting something on the order of the two American operas the city had already seen--Porgy and Bess and The Saint of Bleecker Street. What the composer offered instead was music that verged on dodecaphonism, darkly illuminating a libretto that made the bitter story of Montezuma's defeat by Cortes a parable of good intentions gone astray. The late librettist Giuseppe Antonio Borgese worked directly from 16th century records and chronicles, but Sessions wisely kept his music free of any imitation Aztec feeling; the arid harmonies and the problematic tone-row melodies that mark Sessions' work are the perfect voice for the sense of fatal absurdity that modern tragedy requires.

Balcony Boos. The Deutsche Oper's stagecraft and Montezuma's declamatory style gave the production a Brechtian air. But when Sessions appeared with his cast for curtain calls, a chorus of boos rose violently from the balconies. The avant-garde found the work moldy and Schoenbergian; the traditionalists thought it a shade didactic and severe. Despite the critical praise that followed, no plans were made to perform Montezuma outside Berlin. Sessions, having spent 21 years working on the opera and two more getting it produced, was thus rewarded with the pallid acclaim that is his steady diet. In the fall he will return to teaching at Princeton, which is the way he sustains his career as a distinguished major composer.

-The cast included four Americans in leading roles, causing some comment on why the whole affair did not take place in New York.

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