Thinking Big

The set looked like a huge, ominous Tinkertoy: an abstract tangle of pipes, scaffolds and ladders against a moody blue backdrop. The singers, clambering over it with starkly stylized gestures, seemed to be groping through a hallucinatory dream sequence. "It was," said the composer, "an ideal staging that caught the nightmarish quality I intended and gave it an extra dimension."

Thus the San Francisco Opera last week gave Gunther Schuller's first op era. The Visitation, the kind of production it has always needed and never had. The Hamburg State Opera, which commissioned the work, performed it successfully last year (TIME, Oct. 21, 1966). Yet when the Hamburgers brought their production to New York City last summer, American audiences booed nearly as much as they applauded. Partly they were disappointed by its literal realism, which seemed at odds with Schuller's Kafka-inspired libretto and feverishly atonal score.

There were no boos in San Fran cisco last week. Producer Paul Hager toned down some of the explicit sex and sociology of Hamburg's version, pointed up some of the opera's philo sophical overtones, and allowed Schul ler to reinstate a subtler ending, which the Hamburgers had cut. These modifications, and the new stage design --plus the impassioned singing of Bari tone Simon Estes in the lead -- gave the story of a Negro lynching a harrowing touch of surrealism.

Third Streamer. Composer Schuller, 42, is emerging as one of the most vital figures in American music. No sooner had he finished conducting the San Francisco performance than he hopped a jet back to Boston, where he is in his first year as president of the New England Conservatory of Music. In two months he has revamped the conservatory's somewhat musty operation to put more stress on practical training, brought in 17 new faculty members, expanded the curriculum and stepped up fund raising. "Why not think big?" he asks. "This conservatory could affect the musical education of the nation."

Schuller is also an energetic teacher, lecturer and writer; next April, Oxford University Press will publish the first of two volumes on the history and musical form of jazz. Already a widely played orchestral composer and an innovator of the "third stream" blend between jazz and classical techniques, he has accepted 23 commissions for new works, five of them operas.

What makes it more impressive is that Schuller was a high school dropout, and is a completely self-taught composer ("I learned from the best teachers, the scores themselves"). The son of a New York Philharmonic violinist, he became a professional French horn player at 16, at 19 started a 14-year stint with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. All the while, he composed prolifically. even scribbling notes during rests at performances.

In 1959, the strain of his double career forced him to quit the Met. On the prospects for contemporary composers these days, he is unfashionably optimistic. "We have a larger, more promising and better-educated group of composers in this country than we have ever had," he says. "They are being heard more than they were 20 years ago." Financially, a composer with talent "could expect to be doing pretty well by the time he is 45 or 50." Clearly, in more ways than one, Schuller is doing pretty well.

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