Shocker in Rome

The Rome Opera House puts great stress on some kinds of decorum: the doorman turned famed Composer Igor Stravinsky away one night last week because he was not in formal dress. But Romans have no rules against hoots and whistles during a performance that fails to please them. Boulevard Solitude, a muchdiscussed, three-year-old opera by a 27-year-old German named Hans Werner Henze, went against the grain that night and drew a record outburst.

Henze's plot takes the old story of Manon Lescaut forward to the Paris of 1950 and turns its willful heroine into a strumpet and murderess, her brother into a pimp and thief. Henze's music is largely in a clangorous twelve-tone technique.

After a successful series of performances in Germany, Boulevard Solitude was chosen as a showpiece for Rome's two-week International Conference on Contemporary Music. Familiar as they were with operatic plots featuring faithless love (Pagliacci), harlotry (Traviata), rape (Don Giovanni), incest (Die Walkuere), bastardy (Norma), Gomorrahism (The Rake's Progress) and murder (Tosca, etc.), Rome's select first-night audience balked at Boulevard Solitude.

What bothered Romans was the sordidness of Henze's Manon & Co. in contemporary setting. And they found the patience of Manon's wronged lover, Armand, especially intolerable. When Manon betrayed him for the last time, he sang, "I can stand it no more!" and the audience, almost as one, howled back, "Neither can I!" Even the old gentlemen of the Hunt and Chess clubs, who occupied stage boxes, stood up and yelled "basta!" (enough!) with the gang in the balcony. At times, the only indications that music was being performed were the movements of singers' mouths and the conductor's baton.

Some observers admired the staging, which was done under Composer Henze's direction. The backdrop was surrealistic, the action stark; much of the time dancers moved in the distance, derisively, sometimes vulgarly satirizing the downstage action. But the critics denounced the work unanimously, suggested that the composer was too much the child of a corrupt and violent age. "His soul," wrote Il Tempo's critic, "is a page on which the evils of our age have written cruel words."

Blond, amiable Hans Werner Henze, who was drafted in the Wehrmacht at 16, rose to corporal, was dazed and worried at his reception. "It's simply a modern love story," he said. "Love and beauty are always expressed in pure dodecaphony [twelve-tone technique], but when I want to stress corruption and immorality the music becomes tonal. They say my opera shows evil, but how can one be evil when one is sincere?" He had one consolation: "At least," he said, "nobody fell asleep at my opera."

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