Jumpin' Opera

When Berlin-born Composer Lukas Foss first came to the U.S. 13 years ago, he used to worry about the European flavor of his music. Once he even went so far as to say: "I want to be considered an American composer ... one of the boys." At 27, blue-eyed Wunderkind Foss takes a little easier view of the matter. "Now," says he, "I set a Sandburg poem to music or a story by Mark Twain without thinking of being an American or not."

The Sandburg poem, Prairie, was the inspiration for a cantata by Foss which won him a citation from the New York Music Critics Circle in 1944. The Mark Twain story, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, became the basis for a one-act opera which was produced last week by Manhattan's new After Dinner Opera Co. It was just about the livest and jumpin'est opera yet turned out by a young composer in the U.S.

Composer Foss hoped his opera had "the air of Mozartean opera buffa." Bright, inventive and folk-tuny, his score had a good deal of the air of Calaveras County as well as a Mozartean pace.

In Jean (The Duenna) Karsavina's libretto, the mustachioed gambler challenges champion frog Dan'l Webster's owner Smiley, then feeds Dan'l up on quail shot while the boys are outside laying their bets for the easy money. Before the contest comes off, the gambler strolls off for a mustache-twirling romance--which provides Composer Foss with an opportunity for some witty, satirical mustache-twirling music. Dan'l loses the contest, but the villain's villainies are found out, and he is brought to frontier justice.

With The Frog safely on its way (it gets another production at the Berkshire Music Festival next month), young Lukas Foss was already looking for a new libretto, "a longer and more serious one--but that doesn't mean everybody has to die at the end." He would have plenty of time to find one and work on it. He has resigned his post as pianist of the Boston Symphony Orchestra to spend next season in Italy as a winner of the American Academy in Rome's Prix de Rome.

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