New Operas, U.S. Style

After four decades of increasing effort, U.S. opera composers are beginning to find their own level. Last week Manhattan's Columbia University Opera Workshop showed off two new works. Both were written with an eye to TV, had cast off the cliches of Italian grand-opera tradition and tried to replace them with something recognizably American: plots that deal with such topics as psychoanalysis and lynching, and melodies that have some of the easy grace--and some of the shallowness--of Broadway show tunes.

The curtain raiser was a frothy "sham in one act" called Malady of Love, with libretto by Film Writer Lewis Allan and music by Broadway Composer and Conductor Lehman Engel. The story: a determined young thing (Ruth Fleming) wins her psychiatrist by telling him her contrivedly erotic dreams. While she sings prettily of herself ("I've been kissed but not mated") a pair of dancers act out her words and the young doctor (sung by a fine baritone, Warren Galjour) loses all his Freudian detachment over what he sees. The 30-minute score is neatly professional.

More meaty is the 40-minute Hello Out There, adapted from William Saroyan's play and composed by a newcomer, Jack Beeson, 32, a student of the late Bela Bartok. Trapped in a Texas county jail sits an easygoing gambler falsely charged with rape, and in danger of being lynched. Before he meets his end, he talks of love and freedom to the jail's cleaning girl and of bitterer truths to the hotheaded husband of the woman he supposedly wronged. The music too often slips out of focus, but at its best contains some genuinely affecting melody (notably in a paean to San Francisco) and some stirring emotional overtones.

Manhattan saw a third new opera last week, when the Mannes College of Music presented Eastward in Eden, by Jan Meyerowitz (TIME, Jan. 30, 1950), based on the 1947 play by Dorothy Gardner. The German-born composer chose an American subject, the tragic, frustrated life of New England Poetess Emily Dickinson, but gave the frail story a pretentious treatment that would have been better suited to Aida or a Greek tragedy.

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