For the Childlike

If lovely, flaccid Helen of Troy could be profitably refurbished by giving her pert ideas of her own in a modern novel, what is to hinder a ribby old cow from knowing a thing or two of the world's ways and expressing herself in song? The ribby old cow may be too old for milk. To be comprehensible to humans, she may have to make herself ridiculous, become a synthetic vaudeville kind of beast with humans installed fore & aft to walk, talk and sing for her. Even so, such a cow serves excellently to point the plot of Jack & the Beanstalk, a "fairy opera for the childlike" with libretto by John Erskine (The Private Life of Helen of Troy), music by Louis Gruenberg. Opera and cow were presented in Manhattan last week as a part of the wealthy Juilliard Musical Foundation's housewarming.

Because a giant had stolen their inheritance (a bag of gold, a hen which laid golden eggs on command, a magical harp) Jack and his mother had to live in a hovel, had finally to resort to selling their faithful cow. A lesser cow would have ambled placidly off to the butcher but the Erskine cow, like the Erskine Helen, had spirit.

When Jack tried to interest her in the excitement of the market-place she glowered and protested in a deep bass voice. She balked along the way, scolded Jack soundly for forgetting the days when he had used her for a charger or for plowing when it would always spoil the butter. At market it was the cow who was smart enough to insist on being sold for the handful of beans which an old witch claimed would return Jack's father's treasures. Fairy beanstalks need no nurturing so it took only a second for one to spring out of the Juilliard stage, for Jack to go shinnying up and find the giant's castle. Then & there the wise cow would have appraised the swaggering giant at his worth, for although he looked fierce storming about and devouring whole roasts of meat, he was more his real self when singing in a silly, spindling falsetto.

But Jack was human and properly awed by appearances. He waited until the giant was asleep to steal the gold and the hen which spilled forth eggs before the audience's very eyes. He used more wit to get the harp, coaxed the giant into making it play some of Gruenberg's jazz, a love song which made the giant fairly maudlin, a lullaby which did the trick. Down the beanstalk scuttled Jack followed by the giant who, being only rubber and hot air, burst and fell in a deflated mass. The witch by this time was a beautiful princess but the Erskine cow had no more inclination for weddings than Composer Gruenberg had had for projecting his score over or even on a level with the Erskine book. There being no profound emotions to express, Composer Gruenberg made no profound attempts. People who remembered the modernistic tendencies of his other works, his Jazz-Suite and Enchanted Isle, were surprised at the melodic simplicity of the Beanstalk score. Most of the music had the smooth, deft charm appropriate to a fairy tale. Only the giant had use for occasional striding dissonances, for an alien piano which characterized him with a noisy, thumping bass.

Unlike most native efforts the Erskine-Gruenberg opera profited by pretending to be no more than it appeared. No advance ballyhoo proclaimed it as a great U. S. achievement or suggested that it would be taken up by the world's great opera houses. The production, in its slight way, perfectly expressed the satirical charm of the libretto. The singers, all promising Juilliard students, had been rehearsed until they were practically free from amateurisms. Jack (at the premiere Soprano Mary Katherine Akins) was believably young but not too cute; the giant (Raymond Middleton) blustered as a giant should. The cow's big scene occurred on the road to market, against a background of misshapen stars. Basso Roderic Cross filled out her front legs, did the philosophizing. The silent hindquarters, unmentioned on the program, were Student Warren Lee's. He maneuvered the eloquent tail-switching, the quizzical lift of a hip which matched such lines as these:

Everything comes of waiting.

The grass in the meadow

Never grows faster

For wishing; and more than haste,

It's meditation that makes milk.

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