Ripples Instead of Waves

The daughter loves the father, hates mother. The mother loves another man, hates the father and daughter. The son loves the mother and the daughter. The mother kills the father. The son kills the mother's lover. The mother commits suicide. The son commits suicide.

This cozy little Aeschylean tangle was just the sort of raw meat that Eugene O'Neill liked to chew on; so he fashioned the plot into his monumental 1931 trilogy Mourning Becomes Electra, set in New England at the end of the Civil War. Now the chiller has come alive again with the premiere of Marvin David Levy's Mourning Becomes Electra at the Metropolitan Opera. It was a cause for rejoicing--and mourning.

Librettist Henry Butler stripped O'Neill's six-hour epic to focus exclusively on the psychological currents that seethe beneath the surface of each of the main characters. Boris Aronson's ghostly sets created decadence and onrushing doom. As drama, the opera unfolded with all the shivering tension of one long, gradually building shriek, thanks in part to the almost balletic direction of Director Michael Cacoyannis (Zorba the Greek). But what made Mourning move was the inspired acting of two darkly beautiful sopranos--Marie Collier as the lusting mother, and Evelyn Lear as the revengeful daughter.

Clever Chatter. With Collier cast as the mother, Composer Levy had to alter the role from mezzo to soprano; he also changed the role of her son from tenor to baritone. That was regrettable. Though John Reardon as the son and Sherill Milnes as the lover both performed superbly, the pairing of two baritones and two sopranos robbed the vocal writing of contrast. More damaging was the fact that Levy's mildly modern score, conducted by Zubin Mehta, did not meet the challenge of the theme, too often resorted to clever percussive chattering that seemed to say "crisis coming!" Melodies meandered, the curiously opaque orchestration lagged meekly behind instead of leaping forward. Save for some rich vocal writing in a second-act quartet and the dissonant clashings above distant martial music in the home-from-the-war scene, the music made ripples where there should have been climactic waves.

Levy, 34, the son of a Passaic, N.J., candy-store owner, seems to be a composer in search of a style; the opera, his first full-length effort, has some swatches of straight classical writing, some Webern, some Stravinsky, some Britten. As a result, the operatic version of Mourning emerges as a compelling drama with polished incidental music. Last week, after two Mourning performances, Levy was busy cutting the three-hour opera by about 20 minutes. It will take more than emergency surgery and fine stagecraft to save a score that was dead to begin with.

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