The Met Wins a Contest

In Manhattan last week, the movies were making opera seductively easy to take. In Sol Hurok's Aida (see CINEMA), the young, beautiful Ethiopian slave girl really was young and beautiful (played by Italy's Sophia Loren, with the singing voice dubbed in); and while the Nile flowed realistically, the extras were dazzlingly costumed and the plot was explained in plain English. Hollywood's Carmen Jones, for its part, transformed the Seville siren into a beautiful American Negro factory girl, took the toreador from the bull into the prize ring and turned the words from Spanish-flavored French into minstrel-show English. With all these modern wonders, the Metropolitan Opera dared to compete, by staging a revival of Umberto Giordano's opera of the French Revolution, Andrea Chenier, a work it has not done in 21 years.

The Met's heroine (plump Soprano Zinka Milanov) acted with all the agility of an animated Epstein statue; one of the heroes (hefty Baritone Leonard Warren) seemed to have heeded to excess Marie Antoinette's famed advice, "Let them eat cake"; and the mob that broke into the Act I chateau seemed neither big nor fierce enough to start a good argument, let alone a revolution. Nevertheless, for anyone with an ear for music and a mind for the elaborate make-believe that is opera, the Met won out handily over its slicked-down and tricked-up competition.

In the Groove. Giordano's 58-year-old opera, loosely based on a true episode, tells how the young Poet Chenier becomes successively enamored of the French Revolution and a French beauty, only to lose both his love and his own head to the guillotine. Also swept up in the swirling action is a servant who turns revolution ary and finds his new power as bitter as his old servitude. The Italian libretto is full of mysterious letters, whispered warnings and preposterous melodramatics. Nevertheless, the opera does convey tremendous theatrical excitement and a sharp sense of the great revolutionary ideal that turned into vulgar tyranny. Particularly rousing in the Met's otherwise conventional staging: the trial scene, with a vicious mob of women in the courtroom bleachers demanding Chenier's blood.*

Composer Giordano (1867-1948) made his most successful effort with Chenier (others: Fedora, Madame Sans-Gene). The opera's melodies may sing a little too much like Verdi's without Verdi's dramatic thrust; its flow may be as slippery as Wagner's without Wagner's soaring sense of continuity. But it has a ravishing choral addio (Act I), a roof-raising farewell duet, and cannily applause-getting arias for all of its principal singers.

Angel-voiced Soprano Milanov, as Chenier's aristocratic amour, and archangel-voiced Baritone Warren, as a servant turned revolutionary, helped make the Met's Chenier a solid success, but the hit of the evening was Tenor Mario Del Monaco, in the powerful title role. When his time came, he stood back, heaved an enormous breath, spread his arms and let fly with a stunning high B flat that he held until it began to sound as if a phonograph needle was stuck in the groove.

Tenor Transformed. For Italian Tenor Del Monaco, the evening marked an amazing transformation. Del Monaco's singing career got a major boost when he was a soldier in World War II: his music-loving C.O. let him sing instead of shipping him to the front. One performance, in Butterfly, brought him his big chance: a buxom soprano watched the tenor sweep up his fragile leading lady and carry her offstage. The visitor was fascinated. "You must come and do it with me in Florence," she burbled. Then and there, Del Monaco earned a reputation more for force than for artistry. After a heavy workout in Florence, he moved to La Scala. His first season at the Met (1951-52) caused some terrible word-hurling. Wrote one New York Times critic of his acting in Otello: "His chop-licking, heart-clasping, tooth-gnashing, narrow-glancing, head-wagging, threatening, tottering behavior had the audience snickering in embarrassment." Critics admired his powerful voice, but found it cold.

Last week the critics enthusiastically reversed themselves on all counts, found his voice both strong and compelling, his acting no longer athletic. How did the change come about? Explains Tenor Del Monaco, an older and wiser man at 35: "I think and I think, so many critics, all of them, criticizing me for the same reason: The acting is not right, he overacts, he sings too loud.' I tell myself maybe I am wrong. So I study hard. This year I feel much better."

*In real life, Poet Andre de Chenier (1762-94), called by French Critic Sainte-Beuve the greatest writer of French classic verse after Racine and Boileau, spoke out against the revolutionists' bloody excesses, was eventually executed for conspiring while in prison.

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