Home-Grown Opera

If folk music is the good earth from which much great music springs, the U.S. has a rich subsoil. But little has been cultivated outside the jazz patch, and the U.S. opera crop has been especially sparse. Last week a foreign-born U.S. composer proclaimed that the soil was ready to bear, if only U.S. composers would work it. He offered a piece of his own produce to prove his point.

Down in the Valley, a one-act "folk opera" by Composer Kurt Weill and Librettist Arnold Sundgaard, had become a sensational hit on the campus theater circuit all over the U.S. Written a year ago, it had already had some 80 separate productions. Last week its latest one was the biggest hit in the three-year history of Manhattan's zestful Lemonade Opera company.

The opera house, a church basement in Greenwich Village, was sold out for nearly a week in advance. Said the manager: "We're swamped." Said Weill, who has already made $2,000 in royalties from the piece: "There are little opera companies all over the country which are crying for just this sort of thing ... If I had three of these one-act operas to make a full evening's entertainment, they would make a living for both composer and librettist."

B.W. Loves J.P. Weill intends to write them soon, and a full-length opera as well, all based on U.S. folk tales and tunes. He thinks there is plenty of material for others to follow suit. "The trick," he says, "is to write them so nonprofessional groups can do them."

Down in the Valley is made to that measure. No scenery is needed, and fewer than a dozen singers, none of whom needs any great vocal range or agility. The story is pathetic enough to sluice any church basement with tears. Brack Weaver loves Jennie Parsons. Her father wants her to pay attention to Thomas Bouche, who has him on a financial hook. Jennie refuses. Bouche pulls a knife on Brack. Brack kills him, is sentenced to death, escapes from jail to spend his last hours with Jennie, then goes dutifully back to die.

Some customers feel that the libretto should have been poured over a waffle instead of an audience, but most of them like Weill's witty, musicianly development of the folk themes (Down in the Valley,

Sourwood Mountain, Hop Up, My Ladies). And critics agree that he has shown how to grow native opera--even if it is only small-potato-size opera.

Only Twelve Tones. "Everything I have done so far has been working toward this," Kurt Weill said last week. Everything began for him in Dessau, Germany. Townspeople soon knew that the little boy, whose huge eyes and rudimentary physique gave him somewhat the look of a tadpole, was already composing music. At 13, he wrote his first opera. At 18, he went to Berlin to study with Engelbert Humperdinck (Hansel and Gretel), that same year became conductor of the opera at the small town of Luedenscheid.

The famed pianist and composer, Ferruccio Busoni, with whom Weill next studied, gave him some basic advice that he has followed ever since: "Don't be afraid of banality. After all, there are only twelve tones in the scale."

After a three-year fling at writing esoteric orchestral works in hostile sevenths, Weill returned to open harmonies and to the theater. The Protagonist made him a European name at 26. The phenomenal success of Die Dreigroschenoper (The Three-Penny Opera), with its fiercely naturalistic street scenes and street music, made him one of the most talked-about figures in European music. He became world-famed for his Gebrauchsmusik (practical music).

Like Turkey to Mozart. In 1933, Kurt Weill was pronounced a "Kultur Bolshevist" by Hitler, and he fled the Third Reich. Two years later he left Europe for the U.S. "America was to us young Europeans what Turkey was to Mozart," he says, "the land where impossible things happened."

The impossible happened to Weill in 1938: he had a Broadway hit, Knickerbocker Holiday. Then he had two more, Lady in the Dark and One Touch of Venus. His musical version of Elmer Rice's Street Scene, which followed, was his first genuine U.S. folk opera.

Asked if it wasn't rash for a man who never saw the U.S. until he was 35 to think he could develop a native U.S. art form, Weill was emphatic: it is actually a good deal easier for a foreigner to portray the U.S., he said. "Americans seem to be ashamed to appreciate things here. I'm not."

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