In Need of a Laugh

Comic opera is an elusive and diffi cult form to bring off successfully, and for most composers the first attempt is the last. Now Hans Werner Henze, a severely modernist composer who con sidered that any music that had a tune was not serious, has taken his first plunge and found himself with a re sounding success. Premiered at West Berlin's Deutsche Oper, The Young Lord has been a solid sellout for each of its seven performances.

Local Shock. The libretto is based on German Novelist Wilhelm Hauff's tale of a wealthy English intellectual who settles in a small German town. An noyed by the persistent attempts of the townsmen to pry into his personal life, he plots revenge by arranging a ball in honor of the impending visit of his nephew, Lord Barrat. The nephew ar rives, and the local gentry see him as the personification of the beau monde.

At the ball, he plops his feet on a ta ble, guzzles a drink, then nonchalantly tosses the cup and saucer over his shoul der. The ladies swoon. The men desper ately try to emulate his every action, even when he hops onto the ballroom floor and reels off a spastic impromptu dance. Lord Barrat grows increasingly unruly until he literally flips his wig and exposes his true nature. He is an ape.

As a satire of German provincialism, The Young Lord falls somewhere be tween high comedy and slapstick farce.

Die Welt enthusiastically pronounced it the "rebirth of opera buffa." Its impact has been so great that opera houses in several European cities -- including Rome, Hannover, Cologne, Florence and Venice -- have made room for it in their upcoming seasons.

Backward Progress. When Henze leaped into prominence with his opera Boulevard Solitude eleven years ago, he was instantly claimed by the avant-garde fraternity. Boulevard Solitude met the necessary entrance requirements. It had a fragmented, stridently atonal score and a controversial libretto, a nightmarish tale of pimping, prostitution and perversion. But in the succeeding years Henze, who occasionally wove snatches of jazz and Puccini-like vocal lines into his clangorous twelve-tone passages, turned more and more to traditional harmonies.

In The Young Lord, he has reverted

to unabashed tonality. The kaleidoscopic

score, while not exactly hummable, is

laced with pleasant melodies. Atonal

music, Henze insists, is not suitable for

j comic opera because it does not "radiate

; cheerfulness," but evokes, instead, "a

: sort of undefined anxiety that is the

: opposite of merriment."

Now blackballed by the modernists, Henze at 38 likens himself to the central figure in all his operas--an Einzel gaenger, one who goes it alone. He thinks that his impulse to compose a comic opera was merely psychological release. "There comes a point in life," he explains, "when one simply has to laugh."

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