Blind, Burning & Bland

The No. 1 topic in the opera world last week was the Callas fracas (see above), but there was other news, notably a new work by Gian Carlo Menotti and a new edition of two grand old operatic favorites.

New Menotti. Figuring that there are more paying customers for a Broadway show than for an opera, Producer David Merrick billed Menotti's Maria Golovin as a "musical drama," insisted that it be reviewed by drama critics, even tried to bar music critics from the theater. Producer Merrick (nicknamed "The Abominable Showman" by Broadway wags) need not have troubled. Either as drama or as music, Maria Golovin (first performed in Brussels last summer) is something of a disappointment. The plot is built on a theme that seems to have an obsessive fascination for Composer-Librettist Menotti: the maimed (in this case blinded) hero who is loved and finally destroyed by a beautiful woman. "I'm apt," says Menotti, "to express myself as a spiritually crippled person."

There are a great many melodramatically effective scenes in this tale about a blind young man, Donato, who falls desperately in love with a married woman and becomes entangled in another form of blindness--jealousy. But the impact is marred by banalities of speech ("You know we can't go on like this") and the hero's unsympathetic character. For Donato seems not so much a good man tragically crippled by the loss of sight as a psychopath who happens to be blind.

As for the music, a clue comes when a minor character (representing Menotti's caricature of modern-minded critics) deplores the romantic 19th century and asks: "Must music be only sweet?" In this work, as never before, Menotti proves himself essentially a 19th century composer. At its worst, the Golovin score is not only too sweet but too facile. Example: when the hero stomps up and down waiting for the heroine to keep a rendezvous, the effect is reminiscent of "suspense music" on a TV show. At its best, the score is hauntingly tender and compelling, notably in a trio, which has the cast's three women sit and sew--three fates each busy with separate and private memories.

At week's end Maria Golovin closed after five performances, but it has already been recorded by RCA Victor, and NBC intends to produce it on television, which may provide a better setting for the work's small-screen passions. Golovin's best feature: its cast, including Franca Duval, Patricia Neway and the bass-baritone find of the year, 22-year-old Richard Cross, who left college (Iowa's Cornell) only 18 months ago, but sings Donato with power and conviction.

New Cav-Pag. To refurbish the perennially popular double bill of Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci, the Met's Rudolf Bing got lavish, handsome but unimaginative new sets from the hands of Scene Designer Rolf Gerard, hired a top Broadway director, Jose (Long Day's Journey into Night) Quintero. Although he had never done an opera before, and had seen only half a dozen in his life, Director Quintero somehow managed to absorb most of the stagy, stiff-kneed mannerisms of traditional opera productions. Nevertheless, particularly in Pagliacci, he added some truly exciting touches: Nedda, starting her first-act aria reclining voluptuously on the steps leading to the open-air stage; Canio, ripping off his white clown's coat at the opera's end, revealing a blood-red shirt. All in all, it was a topnotch new Pagliacci, thanks partly to robustious Tenor Mario Del Monaco, who not only burned the gold paint off several rear boxes with a scorching Vesti la giubba, but turned in a chilling acting job as well.

Another story was Cavalleria, in a kind of performance that would have done well in a provincial Italian opera house. Dimitri Mitropoulos, when he was not drowning out the singers with his orchestra, conducted as if afflicted by an overdose of Miltown. Soprano Zinka Milanov found her still-beautiful voice crumbling around the edges. Allowances are customarily made for inept acting in prima donnas, but Diva Milanov plunged beyond the point of tolerance as she flung herself about the stage clutching her ample midriff. She provided a fine argument for bringing back Callas at all costs.

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