Seattle's Soldat

Perhaps because Sir Thomas Beecham once called Seattle a "cultural dustbin," the town in the past few years has been resolutely shaking off the soot.

The Seattle Repertory Theater, formed in 1963, plays Moliere and Tennessee Williams. The creditable Seattle Symphony plays to S.R.O. audiences in the city's five-year-old cultural center, and the Seattle Opera Association's fledgling company has packed the house for most of its three seasons, attracting such singers as James McCracken and Joan Sutherland to perform with its relatively unknown local talent.

For a production of Igor Stravinsky's Histoire du Soldat last week, Seattle Opera Director Glynn Ross got no less a guest star than Stravinsky, who at 84 flew up from Los Angeles to conduct the lyrical fairy tale he composed 50 years ago. In addition, Ross got Saul Steinberg, whose metaphysically satirical cartoons appear in The New Yorker, to design the sets; Actor Basil Rathbone was the narrator, Screen Actor John Gavin the soldier, Ballerina Marina Svetlova the princess, and Dancer Anton Dolin the Devil.

Stravinsky called the 93-minute Sol at "musical theater without singing." With narration, dialogue, mime and a charming score* that prances through tangos, jazz waltzes and chorales, it tells the parable of a soldier who encounters the Devil and sells him his fiddle (his soul) in exchange for the secret to the world's treasures. When wealth brings him misery, the soldier regains his fiddle but loses his soul once more by violating the Devil's condition that he never return to his homeland.

Steinberg's sets are multi-layered whimsies raised and lowered like window shades and decorated with semi-Oriental fantasy furniture in the style of china-plate Ming. "I have made the sets to coincide with the work's philosophical nature," Steinberg explained, and then mischievously interpreted Stravinsky's allegory: "This work shows the usefulness of the Devil. He changes people's lives by giving them things they don't really want. The evolutionary quality of the Devil is very useful."

About 2,500 people turned up for the grand performance (leaving 500 seats vacant in the Opera House), but for all the brilliant sets and Stravinsky's authoritative conducting, Soldat came off a trifle ragged in places. Which did nothing to discourage Director Ross. Stravinsky and the other stars won't be along, but soon Ross plans to pack up the Steinberg sets and a company of his regular troops to tour with Soldat throughout the state's mining towns, lumber camps and Indian reservations.

* Written for only seven instruments: clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, trombone, drum, violin, bass.

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