Innovations in Opera
Vernon, Grenville
INNOVATIONS IN OPERA By GRENVILLE VERNON THE Metropolitan Opera Company is searching —of that there can be no doubt. Tired of being called by some a museum, by others a morgue, and by still...
...Its futurism never overstepped the bounds of sense...
...Skyscrapers is, in a sense, symbolic...
...Sefior De Falla's La Vida Breve was, on the other hand, distinctly a disappointment...
...Its expression of life as divided into two water-tight compartments—work and play, both permeated by the spirit of jazz—is certainly American—not the America of forty years ago...
...Much had been expected of Igor Stravinsky's Le Rossignol, far more than was realized...
...Soudeikine in his scenic investiture, which was extraordinarily colorful...
...There is in him nothing of that high seriousness, that fidelity to a personal artistic revelation which alone can make creative art significant...
...Slaves of their own sophistication, the very fact that they are the heirs of all the musical knowledge of the past, has rendered their creative impulse strangely barren...
...In looking back over these three weeks, we Americans may well be satisfied, for it was neither Manuel De Falla's La Vida Breva, nor Igor Stravinsky's Le Rossignol which sent a thrill of excitement through a first-night audience...
...But Skyscrapers is another matter—not only in its music, but in its scenic investiture, in the nature of its dances, in the inchoate quality of the action...
...And so, during the last three weeks we have had revealed to us a new ballet from America, and new operas from Spain and Russia...
...But in Le Rossignal both his virtues and his defects are evident to all...
...Tired of being called by some a museum, by others a morgue, and by still others a circus, it is striving to prove that it is the home of a new and vital art...
...and not the whole of the America of today...
...The score was well made, and there were moments of real beauty, notably in the musical evocation of Granada, but, on the whole, it was typical Italian opera vitalized by the employment of Spanish rhythms...
...It all seemed like a feeble echo of Rimsky-Korsakof's Le Coq d'Or...
...his rhythmic sense, extraordinary...
...The Spanish soprano has rarely been heard to better advantage, and did her utmost to rescue from boredom the work of her fellow countryman...
...not, it is to be hoped, the America of the future...
...Stravinsky's talent is enormous...
...Serafin...
...But the Metropolitan, at least, is not content, knowing full well that in art where there is contentment there also is death...
...The score of The Birthday of the Infanta showed a rare mastery of the orchestra and possessed not a little rhythmic fancy, but, after all, it was a ballet like other ballets...
...Carpenter's credit—and to Mr...
...His virtues are eclectic and synthetic...
...It was John Alden Carpenter's Skyscrapers...
...and both these qualities were present in his musical setting of Hans Christian Andersen's fairy-tale...
...Jazz for him is but one element in his orchestral pattern, for even the hectic life of our cities has its moments of lyric beauty...
...That night there were no whispered apologies among either the critics or the public to the effect that, after all, "America is still a young nation," for Skyscrapers was received with genuine enthusiasm and delight...
...It is significant that the only other American work ever presented at the Metropolitan which approached Skyscrapers in significance was also a ballet—Henry F. Gilbert's Dance in Place Congo...
...His mastery of the orchestra is positively diabolic...
...It is the America of our popular music, of our dances, of our amusement parks, of our tabloid newspapers, of that spirit born of the Negro and adapted and exaggerated by the Jew which saturates the mob of our cities...
...It is an early work of the Spanish composer and showed little of the personal quality displayed in his puppet opera, El Retablo de Maesa Pedro, given earlier in the season by the League of Composers...
...It is, then, to Mr...
...The sole outstanding feature was the singing and acting of Lucrezia Bori...
...Yet, they got him nowhere...
...We might balk at his choice of subject, but once we have accepted it, we must meet it on its own terms...
...Written to the story of Oscar Wilde, it was, despite the modernity of the orchestration, quite in the tradition of the ballets of the past...
...Carpenter should have accomplished something he had no intention of accomplishing...
...The three solo dancers imported for the occasion from the ranks of vaudeville, performed their part to perfection, while the usually stereotyped corps de ballet found itself galvanized into life...
...In the two ballets there was life and spontaneity and gusto...
...Not even Stravinsky is that...
...That it has proved it is another matter—opera has ever been conservative, and opera audiences even more so...
...In Mr...
...But creators—no...
...The jazz age is essentially an age devoid of reflection, and such an age can possess none of these except the last, while a life purely animal and mechanical cannot be gay...
...It is no business of a critic to argue that Mr...
...Jones's scenery admirably suited the spirit of the music...
...in the operas there was only a wooden emptiness...
...Once again was posed the problem set by so many of the moderns, and by none more forcibly than by Igor Stravinsky...
...Skyscrapers is not the first successful ballet written by Mr...
...By the means of the employment of Russian folk themes he managed to obscure this fact in his Petrushka, and the grotesque power of his Sacre de Printemps fooled many of us at a first hearing...
...To fill the house, announce Aida or those operatic Siamese twins, Pagliacci and Cavalleria—it is a tried and trusted rule in the opera houses of every land, including our own Metropolitan...
...It was a pity to have so much talent and effort wasted on such shallow material...
...Once before, in The Birthday of the Infanta, and then, as now, in collaboration with Robert Edmund Jones, he produced a work of unusual charm and theatrical effectiveness...
...The musical direction of both operas was under the masterly baton of Mr...
...Those who hold that the dance rhythms of the negro have furnished the only genuine contribution to a national music-art may well nod contentedly when they put these two works beside the long list of American operas presented by Signor Gatti-Casazza—beside The Pipe of Desire, and Mona, and Shanewis, and the rest...
...They are arrangers, commentators, what you will...
...The fantastic quality of Mr...
...Carpenter...
...his defects are personal...
...Miss Marion Talley sang well enough the music of the Nightingale, and Mr...
...Carpenter's score there is splendid rhythmic inventiveness, and he has never allowed himself to become the slave of jazz for the sake of jazz...
...Didur gave one of his inimitable impersonations as the King...
...Jones's, who designed the scenery and helped evolve the action—that they have set forth incisively the basic animalism, vigor, and color of the scene they chose to paint...
...The real high lights of the production were furnished by Mr...
...The story was simple to naivete...
...It is useless to ask his evocation of the jazz age to possess charm, or original melodic beauty, or even true gayety...
Vol. 3 • March 1926 • No. 21
