Spring Opera

In their search for operatic material, modern composers have been diligently flailing the literary bushes. Three of the latest finds have livened the slack springtime opera season:

P: German Composer Werner Egk (rhymes with peck), who at 56 has five other operas behind him (including The Magic Violin, Columbus, Irish Legend), was casting about last year for the makings of a comic opera ("I didn't want to see them leave unhappy") when he reread Gogol's The Inspector General. Egk decided it was just the kind of thing he needed. He hacked down Gogol's sprawling list of characters to a manageable 13, set to work composing a score to match the author's farcical tale of a provincial town paralyzed by the news that a civil-service inspector is on the way to investigate its lace-curtain vices. The Schwetzingen Festival (near Heidelberg) gave Composer Egk a handsome, cartoon-style production (by noted Stage Director Gunther Rennert), with the opera's townspeople outlandishly garbed in a mid-19th century assortment of green swallow-tailed coats, crimson velvet caps and propeller-sized bow ties. As the townspeople press money and the favors of their womenfolk on the "inspector"--in the end, of course, he turns out to be merely an amiable, drink-swilling traveler --Composer Egk accompanies them with a staccato, dissonant score pricked by brisk and frequently shifting rhythms. Old-fashioned opera buffs will be startled by the spare arias, which are stripped to a few essential Greek-chorus phrases (in his first aria, the prefect sings over and over again: "Clean shirts, clean nightcaps, Latin mottoes over the beds"). Egk also allows the singers to sing their essential recitatives against the support merely of a sustained bass. The result is an opera that moves with beery gusto and at a breathless, never confused pace.

P: Turkish Composer Nevit Kodalli's announcement that he was planning to put Vincent van Gogh on the operatic stage at first brought howls of protest from critics who believed that it was his duty to choose a Turkish theme. But most criticism ended with the first performance in Ankara. The libretto altered Irving Stone's fictionalized Van Gogh biography, Lust for Life, and reduced it to five scenes: London, in front of the house of Van Gogh's first love, who rejects him with a shout of "you redheaded fool"; Etten, Holland, in front of the Van Gogh's home, where he is rejected by his cousin Kay with the same taunt; a blazing outdoor scene at Aries; the erotic Maya dream sequence; Madame Louise's brothel, where the psychotic Van Gogh cuts off his ear; and finally the shadowy deathbed scene, in which the painter's death is announced by the offstage firing of a revolver and by the slow illumination of his paintings, ranged about the dark walls like sun-filled windows. Although the opera tends to bog down in a weary series of recitatives, the choral writing is marked by a lush, dark-hued beauty, and the hectic orchestral writing is daubed with great splashes of instrumental color as dazzling and at times as savage as Van Gogh's own swirling canvases. A critical success, Van Gogh has already brought Kodalli nibbles from the Vienna Opera and Brussels' 1958 world's fair.

P: Mexico's famed Composer-Conductor Carlos Chavez, 57, unveiled his first opera, Panfilo and Lauretta, at Manhattan's Columbia University. The libretto, by Poet Chester Kallman (The Rake's Progress), springs, not too nimbly, from Boccaccio's dramatic device in the Decameron, in which a group of people take refuge in the Tuscan hills to escape the plague. To pass the time, they tell stories--in the opera, they act out plays--which illuminate their own angry hearts. At last the people of the plague-ridden outside world stream through the gate to bring death, and with it the knowledge of life. But the theme is buried under an avalanche of pretentious words ("Raze the towers of the proud! Mingle their lives in the lives of common men/ Before they are common dust!") that cause the opera to limp and stumble when it should be marching. All too often chained to the clouds of talk and symbolism, Composer Chavez' score nevertheless rises occasionally to moving points of lyric intensity.

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