Hope Opera

On Christmas Eve nine years ago, Gian Carlo Menotti's Amahl and the Night Visitors had its premiere on NBC television, has been a seasonal fixture ever since. Last week another Christmas opera, Golden Child, was displayed on NBC's Hallmark Hall of Fame. Composed by Philip Bezanson with a libretto by Paul Engle, the new work sounded a lot like Menotti gone western--and gone weak. The music kept attempting to soar melodically, but kept being dashed to the ground again by its own heaviness. Still, the score had its stirring, lyrical moments, and Golden Child deserved credit at least for trying to be a serious addition to American opera, to TV and to the season.

Set in California, 1849, the work opens rousingly with a brawling square dance of drunken, gold-greedy prospectors at Sutter's Fort. They ignore Captain Sutter (Jerome Hines), whose heart represents the purest nugget in the West, when he reminds them that it is Christmas Eve, wishes that "gold had never shown its yellow, sneaking face." Meanwhile, out on a snowy, nearby mountain slope, a courageous couple and their daughter (Judy Sanford) are near death from cold and starvation after a long trek west in search of a new life. But miraculously they stumble onto Sutter's Fort, where the revelers suspect them of claim-jumping, refuse to believe her story when the woman (Patricia Neway) explains:

What saved us, what saved us, from those peaks above

Was simple love, our living love.

The miners become a lynch mob, roaring their own credo: "Depend on hate! Our gold needs hate!" But the migrants are protected by Captain Sutter, and that night in his barn the woman gives birth to a boy. At dawn the sunlight forms a cross in the stable, and the golddiggers' chorus chants: "We have been fools, we have been fools," then concludes in a closing hymn, "Love turns the sun."

Amid the melodrama, Golden Child occasionally achieves a sort of folksy universality. While much of the time the score becomes overwrought and the lyrics contrastingly simpleminded, the two collaborators--both members of the State University of Iowa faculty--complement each other remarkably well. Poet-Professor Engle, who heads Iowa's top-rated writing workshop, had joined with Associate Professor of Music Bezanson before on--among other works--a set of tenor songs based on the poet's collection, The Word of Love. Although they would like to try another opera, they would not want to start next time without a commission. Explains Bezanson: "It takes about two years out of your life, and you're just lucky if it clicks."

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