Opera Boom

The U.S. is in the midst of a major opera boom. Last season, 444 groups-- in 45 states gave some 2,400 operatic performances. Two-thirds of them were standard repertory, from the Marriage of Figaro to Madame Butterfly. The rest were contemporary. In the last two seasons, 115 different contemporary operas were performed, 91 of them by Americans.

More than half of the performing groups are college workshops, high schools and conservatories. Knowing that he will probably get his hearing in such a setting, and not at the conservative, perennially strapped Metropolitan, the U.S. opera composer writes in a certain vein. His typical product is a lightweight one-acter with few characters (although it may have a chorus, since singers are plentiful on campuses) and a small orchestra. Its plot is likely to be a fantasy with more moral than melodrama; one act is too short, and young artists are not best suited for grand passion. Its music stems from the German style, i.e., continuous, more or less expressive singing, rather than from the Italian fashion with its separate, show-stopping arias. The voice parts, in their way, are likely to resemble instrumental parts, as they did in the golden age of Italian-style vocalism (up through the days of Handel). Modern composers find this kind of singing more expressive than the vocal thunder of a Celeste A'ida.

Last week stage premieres of new operas sprouted like crocuses around the U.S. Among them:

P: Norman Dello Joio's The Ruby, at Indiana University, Bloomington, had an effective libretto taken from the Lord Dunsany thriller about ruffians who steal the jeweled eye of an oriental idol only to meet the idol's gruesome, supernatural revenge. New Yorker Dello Joio, 42, known for the ballet On Stage! and the opera The Triumph of St. Joan, has mastered the stage idiom, molded his music in short, restless phrases. His score was notably effective, if not very modern.

P: Theodore Chanler's The Pot of Fat, at the Longy School of Music, Cambridge, Mass., had a plot based on a Grimm fairy tale about the disastrous marriage between a trusting mouse and a villainous cat. The libretto evoked critical catcalls, but the music had a light charm bordering on jazziness. At 53, Composer Chanler has never tried his hand at opera before, but his songs are standouts.

P: Leon Stein's The Fisherman's Wife, produced with two-piano accompaniment by the International Society for Contemporary Music in Chicago, was based on another Grimm story, this one about a fellow who catches an enchanted fish, gives it its freedom and is granted his every wish in return. His shrewish wife takes over the wishes for herself. She becomes king, then emperor, but when she demands that she be made God, the whole strike-it-rich setup collapses. Composer Stein, 44, who is a conductor and a teacher at De Paul University School of Music, saw it more as a serious than a comic affair, and most of the music had a mournful cast.

P: Ned Rorem's A Childhood Miracle, produced with two-piano accompaniment by Punch Opera in Manhattan, was a fragile piece of Hawthorne about two little girls whose snowman comes to life and entertains them until grownups drag him indoors and he melts to a puddle by the firelight of reality. Composer Rorem, who now lives in Paris, wields his Ravel-lian style with an almost too delicate hand. But he is, at 32, a master writer for the human voice.

P: Bernard Rogers' The Nightingale (on a double bill with Miracle) retells the famous Andersen fairy tale of the Chinese emperor who prefers a mechanical nightingale to the real thing. This is Rogers' fourth opera (his second was The Warrior, which was sung at the Met in 1947). At 62, he shows some pleasant signs of mellowness, but The Nightingale's chirping was too insistently Chinese and too disorganized for comfort.

The high-caliber opera workshops are evidence of a demand for opera that eventually may bring about more truly professional productions. Says Composer Dello Joio: "We're on the threshold of a real American theater. We haven't had our Verdis and Wagners yet. It is inevitable in the next twenty years."

The composer who has come closest to being America's Verdi or Puccini. Gian-Carlo Menotti. last week took his Saint of Bleecker Street (TIME. Jan. 10) to Milan's great La Scala. Italian-born Composer Menotti, who has lived in the U.S. for 27 years, got a real gala-Scala panning from Italian critics. Wrote Rome's Giornale d'Italia: "There is not an idea, not a melody, not a note which is not either closely or distantly attributable to someone else ... If this is what it means to write opera, let's not talk about it any more.'' But the audience enjoyed the show as much as New Yorkers have, called Menotti back for two dozen bows.

* The previous season there were only 386, and ten years before a mere 77, according to a survey by the Metropolitan Opera Guild's Opera News.

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