Frozen Interplay

At 41, Ned Rorem is tall, dark, hand some and undoubtedly the best com poser of art songs now living. "I can put anything to music, including the en cyclopedia," he once remarked, with an engaging lack of diffidence. The New York City Opera and the Ford Foundation believed him, commissioned him to do an opera. Last week Rorem's opera, based on Strindberg's Miss Julie, had its premiere. The overall verdict: Rorem would have been better off with the encyclopedia -- and the U.S. is still looking for its first major operatic composer.

Not that Rorem did not produce a singable and at times memorable score. But the materials of the play resist transmogrification into that elusive amalgam of drama and music that is successful opera. Rorem's struggle, in fact, is a classic example of the peculiar agony that creating an opera can be. When he got the Ford Foundation's grant four years ago, he first tried a setting of DuBose Heyward's novel Mamba's Daughters, was deep into it when the project had to be scuttled be cause of copyright problems. Then he tackled an original libretto by a friend, entitled The Cave. But alas, says Rorem, "after I had finished the whole thing, nobody knew what it was all about, including me."

Deep South? Hollywood? On to Colette's Cheri; more copyright problems, another misfire. Deciding that "you can't write opera unless it's you," he hit on Strindberg's play Miss Julie, whose morbid Freudian thickets "fitted me; I am fascinated with death." The Scandinavian setting, too, suited his Norwegian heritage, but he and Librettist Kenward Elmslie figured that the drama might have more impact if transformed into a love tragedy involving a Deep South heiress and her Negro servant. Timely and all that. Off to New Orleans they went to soak up some local color, only to belatedly discover that it "just wouldn't work." How about changing the locale to Hollywood, with the conflict between an actress and her understudy? "No," said New York City Opera Director Julius Rudel. Hmm. Why not just keep it straight Strindberg?

But the interplay of a neurotic count's daughter and her sadistic butler lover baring their psyches for two hours is about as static as an opera can get without freezing right in its tracks. To give it life and thrust, music of explosive lyric power and sweep was needed. Rorem, a conservative composer who scorns the avant-garde ("They are all writing the same piece"), provided instead a score that is largely music-to-probe-the-subconscious-by--moody, groaning, occasionally dissonant. The few lighter moments--a duet between two village lovers, the chorus celebrating the festival of Midsummer's Eve--were charmingly melodic, but the overall impact was blandly uncompelling. The sets, which Rorem confesses he "hates," were gingerbread concoctions totally antithetical to the spirit of the opera, and Soprano Marguerite Willauer in the title role sang with the handicap of a severe cold.

Rorem, who was raised as a Quaker in Chicago, spent eight years in Paris, working most of the time in the 18th century mansion of his aging patron, the Vicomtesse de Noailles. He returned to the U.S. in 1959, taught at the University of Buffalo. "It was a juicy salary," he says, "but I hated it. Most of the students were such clods--and I was jealous of the rest." In January he plans to accept a similar post at the University of Utah, where he hopes to create an opera for the cinema. "Utah is such a boring state," he explains. "I know it will be good for my work."

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