Opera Is Still Alive in New York

By Gerald Clarke

Three new works by U.S. composers at Lincoln Center

At the Met, still closed by a labor dispute, all was dark, silent and desolate. But next door at Manhattan's Lincoln Center huge banners fluttered from the balcony of the New York State Theater: NEW YORK CITY OPERA--WHERE OPERA COMES ALIVE. And so it did last week, as the City company presented new works by U.S. composers. In an evening titled "An American Trilogy," the company premiered three one-act works by two well-known New Yorkers, Stanley Silverman and Thomas Pasatieri, and a relatively unknown Middle Westerner, Jan Bach. The results were mixed, but overall the night was a success and a must for anyone interested in the state of American opera.

The least rewarding is the first of the three, Silverman's Madame Adare. Using a libretto by Richard Foreman, his longtime collaborator, the composer has written a fantasy, or more precisely a phantasmagoria, about psychoanalysis and creativity. As the piece begins, Miss Adare, played by Soprano Carol Gutknecht, is seeing her psychiatrist Dr. Hoffman (Bass-Baritone Richard Cross). Her problem: she cannot make up her mind whether she wants to be an opera star or a movie star, and while she dallies, she cannot even make enough money to pay for her sessions. When Hoffman refuses to treat her again until she pays up, she tries to shoot him but misses. Her agent (Baritone James Billings) tells her to make a choice, opera, stage or screen. Then the devil (Bass Harris Poor) appears in a gray three-piece suit. "Simply sign your name," he says, "and I guarantee you fame." Finally she is visited by Diaghilev (Tenor Nico Castel), who also offers her success as a singer.

Opera is her choice, and when she next sees Dr. Hoffman it is to pay him and tell him that she is well. Hoffman refutes her and says that it was a mistake even to try to cure her. Her gift as a singer springs from her neurosis, he says echoing Rilke's famous line: If analysis removes the demons that besiege an artist, won't it also take away the angels that motivate him? Adare replies, "That's garbage, doctor," and pulls out her pistol again, this time killing him. That done she is notorious, and Hollywood beckons. She is both an opera and a film star. She has it all.

If Madame Adare sounds like a jumble, it is. In previous works, Silverman, 42, and Foreman, 43, deliberately avoided linear plot lines in favor of surreal musical and visual images, with results that were sometimes beguiling. Here there are too many images and, perversely, too much plot. Silverman's music is as always, eclectic and occasionally witty. When Adare decides to become an opera singer, for instance, the orchestra plays strains from Boris Godunov. Unfortunately, Silverman seems to have no point of view, and his music is an uninspired melange.

The second one-acter, Pasatieri's before Breakfast, is considerably more successful. Adapted by Director Frank Corsaro from a play by Eugene O'Neill , it is a melodrama similar in style, if not in score, to Poulenc's La Voix Humaine. The setting is a grim Depression flat. Soprano Marilyn Zschau is preparing breakfast for her husband before leaving for her own job as a waitress. While she flops around the room in her slip, she carries on a one-way conversation with the silent and unseen spouse as he gets up and goes into the bathroom to shave.

Mostly she berates him as a cheat and a loafer. She is an immigrant's daughter; he is the son of a millionaire who lost his fortune. They met at a dance marathon and married soon after. Now she supports him by waiting on tables, while he spends his days writing, drinking and philandering. She assaults him with this sorry history, until finally, past mere desperation, he uses his razor to cut his throat. Zschau rushes into the bathroom and emerges appropriately, with his blood on her hands.

It is an intense work, musically as well as dramatically, and both the composer and the singer make the most of it. Pasatieri's music is pleasing rather than profound, but his lyrical gift is real. There are beautiful swelling orchestral lines in before Breakfast, and a touching, plangent piano solo. The influence of Gian Carlo Menotti is obvious, but in this, his 14th opera, Pasatieri speaks nonetheless in a voice all his own. Zschau is generally impressive in a role that was originally written for Beverly Sills. Zschau is a fine actress, as well as singer, and her only fault, a major one alas, is her inability to enunciate clearly all of Corsaro's words.

Perhaps the most interesting of the new productions, however, is the one by the least known composer. Bach, 42, a professor of music at Northern Illinois University in De Kalb, Ill., had written only one opera before The Student from Salamanca, but he clearly knows what he is doing. Using two short Cervantes works, which he put into words himself, he has created an amusing variation on an old theme: the young wife, the old husband and the handsome young man who comes along to complicate their lives.

When Craccio, the old man, goes out of town, Cristina, an attractive housemaid, brings two men to entertain her and her pretty mistress. The men, the town barber and apothecary, are comic oafs, and both women are relieved to hear another male voice from offstage. Enter the student from Salamanca, who has been beset by robbers and is looking for food and lodging--among other things. The husband unexpectedly returns, and the plot goes on its merry way to a happy ending.

There are hints of Rossini and Donizetti in all this. Yet Bach manages to translate traditional themes into his own idiom: the opera's feeling is classical; its music is modern. The opening sets the tone, with sounds as light as Lloyd Evans' airy sets. The momentum flags some what in the middle, but then at the end the composer recaptures his inspiration with a beautiful fugue, all six singers joining in joyous celebration. The cast is admirable. Beverly Evans as the maid is a good bit more than admirable, combining a fine mezzo-soprano with a deft feel for low comedy.

Two successes out of three tries is not bad, and Beverly Sills, the City Opera's new general director, can take pride in this entire program. Where is opera in America? Go to the muted Met's neighbor and find out. --By Gerald Clarke

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