Travesty on Gluck

With high hopes one evening last week hundreds of earnest music-lovers went to Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House, prepared to listen in all respect to a long-neglected masterpiece. Gluck's Orjeo et Eurydice, missing from the Metropolitan repertoire since 1914, had been promised as one of the highlights of the Popular Spring Season (TIME, May 25). The production was to be in a way experimental, with the singers placed in the orchestra pit while dancers from the American Ballet mimed their roles on the stage. Even among purists such a prospect aroused little concern. A similar device had worked successfully with Rimsky-Korsakov's Cog d'Or, seemed ill-suited to the 18th Cen-tury Gluck, whom Isadora Duncan consistently referred to as the greatest of dance composers.

What Ballet Master George Balanchine and his collaborator Paul Tchelitchev offered was the most inept production that present-day operagoers have witnessed on the Metropolitan stage. The bereaved Orpheus was personified by Lew Christensen, a tall, strapping young man from Portland, Ore., who wore black trunks, black mitts, a black cape and a lyre on his back, expressed his sorrow by thrusting his fists into the air, swaying before a funereal mound which could easily have covered scores of Eurydices. Muscular William Dollar, a native of St. Louis, leaped into the picture as Amor (Love), wearing white tights and great white wings. Dancer Dollar's function was to lead Dancer Christensen to the entrance of Hades, a giant cage contraption which housed furies and scarlet demons who proved no more terrifying than Punch & Judy puppets.

The performers in the pit were no better than average. The Orpheus was Contralto Anna Kaskas from Bridgeport, Conn.; the Amor, Maxine Stellman from Brattleboro, Vt.; the Eurydice, plump Jeanne Pengelly, a native of Toronto, whose part was danced by pretty, half-clad Daphne Vane. Conductor Richard Hageman, rejoining the Metropolitan after an absence of 14 years, did his best by the stately, sculptured score. But only those, who were smart enough to close their eyes could reap its full benefit.

At the end Dancer Dollar was flying through the air suspended by wires. When Orpheus and Eurydice were peacefully reunited, he climbed on top of them, suggesting nothing so much as a Japanese tumbling act. The finale brought laughter which would have driven the hulking, pock-marked composer into one of the rages for which he was famed. Fair-minded critics spared the dancers, who had merely followed their instructions, concentrated their blame on Choreographer Balanchine and his bogus conceptions.

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