Threnody for Lost Men

The scene is an unhealthy-looking cornfield, dark night, no moon. Suddenly police sirens wail, the orchestra sends up shrieks-of-terror music, and automobile headlights pierce the cornstalks, blinding the audience. Police spotlights swim through the corn as two men break through and hurl themselves to the ground. The lights move away, the sirens fade, the men get to their feet, dust themselves off, and begin the harrowing story of long-suffering, downtrodden George and his simple-minded buddy Lennie. Of Mice and Men is once more on the stage, not as a play but an opera.

Set to music by Carlisle Floyd and given its premiere last month by the Seattle Opera, Of Mice and Men is the most moving musical drama to come out of America since the natives of Catfish Row tangled with Porgy and Bess back in 1935. The post-Porgy years have offered little in the way of challenge. There are Gian-Carlo Menotti's works, including The Medium, The Consul, The Saint of Bleecker Street, Help, Help, the Globolinks. Also Douglas Moore's The Ballad of Baby Doe, Robert Ward's The Crucible and Floyd's Susannah. But on the whole, American opera has been lacking as much in quality as in quantity.

The better works have done well at the box office, which is more than can be said for contemporary serious music designed for the concert hall. The successful operas are musically conservative but strongly theatrical. They use folk melodies, or original tunes that sound like folk melodies, and whatever musical style seems most suited to the composer's purpose.

Smaller Aims. Composer Floyd, now 43, emerged 15 years ago when he wrote Susannah, a retelling of the biblical story of Susannah "and the elders. Thereafter, he reached higher and sagged lower. Emily Bronte's Withering Heights (1958) and the Civil War Reconstruction story of The Passion of Jonathan Wade (1962) demanded largeness, even grandiloquence. Floyd's talent lay in revealing smaller situations, personal relationships. Since John Steinbeck's interests were in much the same area, Floyd's selection of Of Mice and Men is a perceptive return to the type of work that made Susannah seem a one-shot success.

Floyd has fleshed out the bleak Steinbeck characters, revealed the loneliness and longing behind their failure, and given them music that raises their foolishness, vanity and ambition to the level of high tragedy. The music is extraordinarily singable; its effect is that of glowingly lyrical, somewhat familiar music that one has never heard before. Floyd's libretto transforms Steinbeck's tragic tale of a misunderstood simpleton into a threnody for lost men haunted by a dream--in this case, the dream of a farm of their own. Sings George:

Some dreams is so far away, An' those dreams can break your heart But our dream is so close, so close Just across the street.

Depression-depressed. Turned down by the San Francisco Opera, Floyd's revised version of Of Mice and Men is already scheduled for fall production by the bustling young Kansas City Lyric Theater. In the meanwhile, Seattle operagoers greeted the dramatic yarn of George and Lennie with tense attention. At opera's end, Lennie and George are crouched in the same cornfield. In a final gesture of love, George shoots Lennie to save him from the lynchers, and the curtain falls after the final pistol shot.

The opening-night audience sat in stunned silence, then broke into shouts of enthusiasm. They called for Composer Floyd and for Director Frank Corsaro. With Baritone Julian Patrick as George, Tenor Robert Moulson as the doomed half-wit Lennie, and Soprano Carol Bayard as the ranch-house temptress who teases Lennie once too often, Of Mice and Men seems uniquely American. Like Steinbeck's depression-depressed characters, Floyd's opera has calluses on its hands and hot blood in its heart. It will probably be around a long time.

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