Opera by Americans

There's no quartering here

or things of that kind,

it's improved for our benefit

I'm glad to find .. .

The slop pot is right there

under your nose,

a lot of progress

is what it shows.

The author of this Candide-like scrap of philosophizing is one Joseph Schweik, private first class in the Czech army during World War I. Cheerful Sad-Sack Schweik first turned up back in the 1920s in Czech Novelist Jaroslav Hasek's antimilitary satire, The Good Soldier Schweik. Last week he popped up on the stage of Manhattan's City Center in the premiere of the late Robert Kurka's operatic version and won a warm welcome from audiences in the New York City Opera's spring season of contemporary American works.

Composer Kurka, Chicago-born son of Czech parents, started on the project with Librettist Lewis Allan three years ago, finished the vocal score and 350 pages of orchestration before his death of leukemia last December at the age of 35. His good friend Hershy Kay completed the orchestration from Kurka's red-penciled notes. Loose-jointed and episodic, the opera introduces Schweik (Tenor Norman Kelley) as he is being arrested for "high treason," traces his progress through a scurvy prison and a madhouse, follows him into the army as an orderly. At the end he wanders away from the trenches singing a plaintive little song ("I'll take a quiet road, and I'll lie in the sun/For birds and butterflies, I won't need my gun"), and a bowler-hatted dandy comes onstage to sing his epitaph as "the kind of fellow that fellow men like."

For this picaresque libretto, Composer Kurka composed an astringent score for brasses, wind instruments and percussion only, omitting the strings. Strongly rhythmic, shot through with jazz influences, it occasionally offered a wry commentary on the action, provided at least two moments of moving lyricism: Schweik's apostrophe on war ("Who will go to the war when it comes?") and the Chorus of Wounded Soldiers ("Wait for the ragged soldiers") in the final scene. But overall, the music was too fragmented to be effective, or to redeem the curiously Panglossed-over view that marred the libretto : the apparent belief that Schweik's numskullery is a kind of nobility, and his doglike devotion the only logical defense against the depravity around him.

Soldier Schweik was the ninth opera and the only premiere of the ten scheduled by the New York City Opera in its five-week all-American season. Still to come: Carlisle Floyd's Susannah (TIME, Oct. 8, 1956). Underwritten by $105,000 from the Ford Foundation, the season spans the last 20 years of U.S. operatic production with a repertory drawn from more than 200 submitted works. Among the composers represented were such veterans as Douglas Moore (The Ballad of Baby Doe), Leonard Bernstein (Trouble in Tahiti), Gian Carlo Menotti (The Medium, The Old Maid and the Thief), plus such lesser-known names as Vittorio Giannini (The Taming of the Shrew) and Mark Bucci (Tale for a Deaf Ear).

The critics have given the season generally good notices, especially high on Baby Doe and Shrew. The producers were both praised and damned for including such Broadway-tainted works as Kurt Weill's Lost in the Stars and Marc Blitzstein's Regina. But all the operas were box-office successes, and Lost in the Stars packed them in so effectively that it is getting a one-week reprise at season's end. To City Opera Director Julius Rudel, 37, the season has already proved what he hoped it would: 1) a wide audience exists for good American opera, understandably sung; 2) modern U.S. operatic writing is as good as any in the world.

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