The Musgrave Ritual

By William Bender

Romancing the woman who wasn 't there

As operatic heroines go, Ariadne is definitely not as sweet as Mimi, nor a resolute as Aida, nor as popular as either But composers from Monteverdi to Rich ard Strauss have invariably had a hard time resisting her charms. That is more than can be said for that noted male chauvinist Theseus, who simply dropped her off one day on a tiny Greek isle. Ariadne's latest operatic reincarnation might not be entirely to her liking either: she appears merely as the voice of a missing statue.

But everyone else ought to like the opera.

The Voice of Ariadne was composed by the Scot, Thea Musgrave, 49. Ariadne's U.S. premiere last week by the New York City Opera was, alas, not all it should have been: the acting was often wooden, the settings short on mystery and magic. Nonetheless, the production was good enough to suggest that Ariadne--first performed three years ago at England's Aldeburgh Festival--is a potential classic.

Among other virtues, it requires no chorus and can be performed by a chamber orchestra as small as 13 players. Since the economics of opera are parlous, that alone should ensure the work a long life.

More to the point, Ariadne's music has the blush of innocent freshness to it.It floats from atonality to tonality and back with dramatic precision, bringing to life the libretto's strange world and humanizing its perplexed cast of characters.

The opera is a congenial ghost story freely adapted from a Henry James tale.

In James, the statue unearthed in the gardens is of Juno, and when the Count falls in love with it, the Countess cleverly has it reinterred and saves her marriage. In Musgrave, the statue is Ariadne, but only her pedestal is found. The Count is seduced by her laments, which only he --and the audience (Ariadne's music is on pre-recorded tape)--can hear. He redeems himself through a sort of Wagnerian metamorphosis in which he firs thinks of himself as Theseus, then realizes that the Countess (splendidly sung by a young newcomer, Soprano Cynthia Clarey) is his real-life Ariadne after all Ariadne is a delightful romance, and a the final curtain last week, the audience responded with long applause and bravos. Sharing the reception onstage was Musgrave, who had spent the evening on the podium and was now outsmiling everyone. --William Bender

The Voice of Ariadne burnishes Thea Musgrave's reputation for excellence and innovation. She is today's leading woman composer, but is just as happy to keep sex out of it: "The battle's been won. hasn't it?" she demands in a gentle Scotch burr. "Look, I started out to be a doctor, and could have done it well. But I've come to feel that these days it's more important to re-establish that side of humanity which is imaginative, and lyrical, and all those other things. The fight is not so much for women composers, but for com - posers--and artists. Period."

Few other women composers feel quite so triumphant. Though some U.S orchestras and chamber-music group have played their music in recent year neglect remains the general rule. Still Musgrave is entitled to her success, a ritual for her. Her orchestral works hav been performed by the Philadelphia Or chestra and the Los Angeles and New York Philharmonics. This week she interrupts a New York sojourn to conduct the Scottish Opera in Mary, Queen of Scots, her fourth and latest opera, which was introduced successfully last month a the Edinburgh Festival. In March Mary will be given its U.S. premiere by the Virginia Opera Association. The conductor will be the company's artistic director, Pe- ter Mark, Thea Musgrave's husband. The Marks' home for the past seven years has been Santa Barbara, Calif. There she has been a much-respected teacher of music at the University of California. Small wonder. Not since the days of Dame Ethel Smyth, whose The Wreckers was performed in 1910 at London's Covent Garden under the baton of Sir Thomas Beecham, has a woman composer made such a mark on the world's opera houses.

Musgrave was born in Edinburgh in 1928. Though music was an essential part of her childhood ("I was always composing little snatches of this and that"), it was not until her pre-med year at Edinburgh University that she irrevocably chose a life in music. Soon she was studying with some of Europe's finest teachers, notably Nadia Boulanger in Paris. Like many modern composers, she had a brief flirtation with the 12-tone row but eventually found it confining. She went on to perfect a style that is totally open to the musical world around her--"from Benjamin Britten to the Beatles," says Musgrave--and always enterprising.

Who else, for example, would have used a new fingering that enables the French horn to play an eerie (and unheard-of) quarter-tone passage at the end of Act I, as the Count begins to imagine himself as Theseus? "In art," she says, 'you have to follow your hunch. You can't play it safe." Thea Musgrave aficionados lave a hunch that as long as the composer plays it unsafe, the world's opera houses will play it regularly.

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