A Sense of Adventure

As a boy in Vienna, Conductor Julius Rudel spent endless hours building miniature theaters and staging puppet operas--Salome in a shoe box, Parsifal in a packing crate. The training proved to be apt preparation for his job as director of the New York City Opera. For the past eight years, operating on a budget that would pass for carfare at the Metropolitan Opera, he has been nurturing his company in a glorified Manhattan shoe box called City Center. Last week, like slum kids transported to the country, Rudel and his 200-member troupe moved into the spacious luxury of the New York State Theater at Lin coln Center.

In keeping with the pioneering spirit that has become the company's credo, the opening production was the U.S. premiere of Argentine Composer Alberto Ginastera's fiercely modern Don Rodrigo. Set in 8th century Spain, the opera chronicles the rise of a headstrong young king and, after he has had the bad taste to violate and jilt the daughter of a comrade in arms, his subsequent fall. The performance, honed by five weeks of 13-hour-a-day rehearsals, was excellent. The starkly stylized sets and costumes complemented the jaggedly atonal score; the acting and singing were superb.

Complex Tapestry. Yet as opera, Don Rodrigo was something less than a torrid success. Ginastera's score, based on a twelve-tone scale and structured after the manner of Alban Berg's groundbreaking 1921 masterwork, Wozzeck, struck the ear but not the heart. It was a complex musical tapestry, flecked with startled tones of brass and wood wind and splotched with splashes of percussion. In total, the score failed to achieve the delineation of character and dramatic thrust that distinguish great opera from good. Don Rodrigo was nonetheless an adventure worthy of the underwriting (by Mrs. John D. Rockefeller Jr.), and no company could have done it better than Rudel's.

Indeed, in its 22 years the New York City Opera has established itself as the nation's leading champion of contemporary opera. Of the 116 productions it has staged over the years, 60 have been 20th century works, including 26 U.S. and world premieres. Quite a record for a company that was founded as something of an afterthought. Back in 1942, when the Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine was unable to pay the taxes on its Mecca Temple, Fiorello La Guardia foreclosed. The place was an unsalable white elephant, a dome-topped edifice built in 1925 and styled in Turkish-bath rococo. La Guardia finally decided to subsidize an opera company to present quality productions at moderate prices. Hungarian-born Conductor Laszlo Halasz was recruited as director, and in 1944 the New York City Opera made its debut with Tosca. It was a shaky start. In Tosca's last act, the guns of the firing squad failed to go off and the hapless hero was obliged to keel over in dead silence. Building maintenance was just as makeshift. One rainy night, to dramatize the need for repairs to the roof, Mayor Vincent Impellitteri was given a pair of tickets for seats directly under a dripping leak.

Live Duck. Pioneering began early. In its second year, the company became one of the first to break the color barrier in opera, starring Negro Baritone Robert Todd Duncan in I Pagliacci. Mixing "ham-and-eggs repertoire"--A'ida, La Boheme, Carmen--with such rarely performed works as Ermanno

Wolf-Ferrari's The Four Ruffians, the company gradually developed an audience attuned to new and experimental opera.

In this cause, Julius Rudel has been tireless. A Viennese refugee from Hitler, he fled to the U.S. in 1938, earned a degree in conducting from Manhattan's Mannes College of Music. When the New York City Opera got going, so did Rudel, then 22. He was everything from rehearsal pianist to curtain puller to stand-in for ailing members of the chorus. In 1957, after a clash between the opera board and Erich Leinsdorf (who followed Halasz and Joseph Rosenstock) left the company without a conductor, Rudel was appointed director. The decision was made, says one board member, partly because "Julius was the only man in the place who knew where all the scenery was buried." Just as compelling was a petition from the company's musicians and singers recommending Rudel as Leinsdorf's successor.

In 1957, with the aid of a $100,000 Ford Foundation grant, Rudel presented a season of no fewer than ten American operas. Three years later, he initiated a program of commissioning U.S. composers. The project has so far produced eight new works, including such well-received productions as Douglas Moore's The Wings of the Dove and Robert Ward's The Crucible. Using enthusiasm to stretch his financial resources, Rudel is able to mount first-rate productions for one-tenth the cost of more elaborate opera companies. His singers represent the finest of the younger U.S. crop; at least 80 have gone on to sing at the Met.

Despite last week's switch to glittering new quarters, Rudel insists that he is not switching his basic aim "to reinstate a sense of adventure in the public." Opera, he says, must not reek of the museum.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.