Dismal Doings

When Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera Company picked for production its 16th piece by a U. S. composer, no one was more surprised than John Laurence Seymour, an obscure California schoolteacher who, with little hope, had submitted In the Pasha's Garden. According to one story the Seymour opera was considered at the request of Baritone Lawrence Tibbett, a fellow-Californian. According to another rumor, the Metropolitan judges drew lots when they found they had no new U. S. work which really pleased them. More likely, In the Pasha's Garden was chosen because it has only one act and thus could be cheaply produced. Whatever the reason, it had its premiere at the Metropolitan last week and established an all-time record for dullness and ineptitude.

A gong sounded feebly, horns droned, strings quavered mistily and the curtain went up on what was supposed to be a kiosk on the Bosporus. Composer Seymour had taken his plot from Author Harrison Griswold Dwight's Stamboul Nights. A Hollywood friend named H. C. Tracy had hacked out the libretto. But, at first, words were lost while the audience gaped in bewilderment at Frederick Kiesler's setting. The kiosk resembled the turret of a battleship topped by an old-fashioned lampshade. To suggest the garden a lighting arrangement projected on the backdrop a horizontal stem and four big embryonic leaves. A moon was suspended in the sky like a bruised alligator pear.

Mr. Kiesler's leaves had a disconcerting way of changing their shape or disappearing altogether. But that, he explained, was his device for following the mood of the opera. Whatever the mood, it made little impression on the audience. Weaving up & down a runway, the Pasha's wife sang of love in the spring to a tenor in white flannels. The scene was interrupted by a spying eunuch whose voice cracked occasionally. The lover hid in a chest. The Pasha, who wore a dinner jacket and a crimson fez, appeared and sang "There is no ta-a-ble, is there?" The wife replied: "There is none." The Pasha said: "I had for-go-o-tten. We'd no need of one, not having dined here lately."

Eventually the pair got down to the business of eating from the top of the chest. But if the wife was nervous she kept it bravely from the audience. Finally she said "If you'll excuse," handed the Pasha the key to the chest and swept off to bed. The Pasha wanted a cigaret but his lighter failed him. So he listened to a flute which was supposed to be a nightingale, then summoned a servant who helped him lug the suspicious box into the garden, there dig a grave for it.

Composer Seymour had said that the orchestra described the characters' true feelings in contrast to the words they sang. Perhaps this scheme was too subtle for the literal-minded. The music was never unpleasant, but for 50 minutes it ambled along like a monotonous introduction to something which never began. Unfortunately for the libretto, the Pasha was played by Lawrence Tibbett whose diction is so clear that the audience understood every word he sang. And fortunately for John Laurence Seymour a Manhattan audience will applaud any new opera. For the occasion the delighted composer had been granted leave of absence from the California State Junior College where he teaches dramatics. His curtain calls sent thrills down his spine. He has written nine operas and the only other one to be produced was a comic thing called The Farmerettes, put on by the Hollywood High School in 1933. On the great Metropolitan stage last week he was presented with a medal--from an American Opera Society in Chicago.

So far as looks were concerned, the Metropolitan has rarely introduced a singer so beguiling as Helen Jepson who took the part of the Pasha's wife. Born 27 years ago in Titusville, Pa., her first job was fitting corsets in a department store in Akron. Later selling phonograph records gave her a taste for opera which led to a scholarship at Philadelphia's Curtis Institute of Music.

Pretty Helen Jepson has a husband who plays the flute, a two-year-old daughter as blonde as herself. Pretty Helen Jepson is an expert fisherwoman and her radio contracts have already made her rich. But pretty Helen Jepson had little opportunity to prove herself more than a light, agreeable singer last week in the Metropolitan's latest and most dismal venture into the realm of native opera.

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