Kipling & Thompson Opera

Operatic climaxes are usually marked by surging strings, blaring brass, rumbling kettledrums; but this time, when the crucial moment came, there was silence. Composer Randall Thompson had a good reason. He had made into a one-act, three-quarter-hour opera the last of Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories: The Butterfly That Stamped--and the climax came at the earth-shaking but quite inaudible stamp of the butterfly.

Thompson's opera, retitled Solomon and Balkis, had its world premiere last Sunday over a CBS network. Commissioned jointly by CBS and the League of Composers, it was the first opera to emerge under the League's "Composers' Theater" plan, inaugurated last year. It got a good plan off to a good start.

The plan was to pull U.S. opera out of the doldrums by getting composers to write operas that are simple and inexpensive to produce, then getting colleges and music schools to produce them. Last year ruddy, twinkling Randall Thompson, 42, was commissioned to compose the first of them. He planned at first to collaborate with Thornton Wilder, but, when that fell through, he turned to his favorite Just So story, found that he could use Kipling's dialogue word for word.

He had picked a good libretto, but no easy theme for an opera. Kipling's fable relates (in the famed Briton's most roll-down-to-Rio prose) how King Solomon's loving wife, Balkis the Most Beautiful, saved her lord from the vexatious quarreling of his 999 other wives. As Solomon strolls in his garden he overhears a butterfly & wife quarreling. The butterfly threatens that if he stamps his foot the palace and garden will vanish in a thunderclap. Solomon, amused, calls up his Djinns, enables the butterfly to make good his threat. In the end Solomon is surprised to discover that clever Queen Balkis engineered the whole thing, to silence the 999 quarreling wives.

To this whimsical tale, which marches like the King of France up to the inaudible stamp, then back again, Thompson added a fresh, unaffected, transparent score packed with singable melody. Listeners, noting the conventional harmonies, the archaic touches, the occasional flavor of Handel's music, decided that Thompson in his music, as Kipling in his story, was turning to the past.

Urbane Randall Thompson looks like neither a musician nor a teacher, but is both. Now at the University of Virginia, he has also taught at Wellesley and University of California, was director of Philadelphia's Curtis Institute until he disagreed with the board of directors last year. Best known for his Symphony No. 2, he has also composed choral works, incidental music for the theater, but no previous opera. For the past ten years all his composing has been on commission. Ignoring the many composers who work on hope and faith, he says: "A musician is like an architect; nobody is going to draw plans until someone is ready to put up a building."

Solomon and Balkis will have its first stage performance later this month, at Harvard's Lowell House.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.