On Music

...ON MUSIC The Metropolitan opera begins its second season in its gaudy, not rich, habitat this month confronted by a novel dilemma Along with its perennial deficit, next season's logistics and this season's problems (standees are now booing —on broadcasts1), Rudolf Bing & Co must face the question that reared itself during the summer How do you follow the Hamburg State Opera7...

...The great difference between the Met and Hamburg, of course, is the man in charge Rudolf Bing may well protest that Rolf Liebermann's company is as handsomely subsidized as the American farmer, but it was idealism that made Liebermann risk only 20th-opera at Expo 67 and Festival '67 Bing always gets money from somewhere—the deficit is invariably met —bus he often splurges it on stuff like operettas, dredged up tromp the Lehar depths—nto on Jejuna and Lulu, true musical dramas with two of the great sounds in opera New York is all the poorer without them, and the opportunity to decide for itself about works like Mathis deer Male (all the lyric and dramatic impulse of Form 1040, I found) and The Rake's Progress (very well conducted by Charles Mackerels but an opera with an uneven score and libretto that was never equally gripping in the same scene...

...By far the damnedest similarity between the two companies was their jointly venting out onto the morass of Amen can opera last season Each sunk m up to the eyeballs too, but that was to be expected Does no one reject these things7 Big in backing Sam Barber's Antony and Cleopatra and Marvin David Levy's Mourning Becomes Electro, must have conceded the same moot point that Washington did with Diem and Key They're all we have out there1...

...Liebermann, m backing The Visitation, by New York-born G??nter Schuler, had reasons no more rewarding but possibly more rate ingoing It was Kafka's The Trial (') moved, in Schuler??s own adaptation, Down South (ah') with a Negro Josef K (Alf) and composed in that amalgam of jazz, 12-tone cacophony and obligatory electronic whooping Schuler has cleverly called "third stream music" What a bargain1 And so American, right down to that little "third-stream" handle for the TV and newsweekly boys to grab on to The Visitation got a deservedly bad press so I will content myself with noting those fatal flaws the critics overlooked Kafka's slow, legalistic dooming was wholly unlike the brutally direct Dixieland process (I don't think Schuler read the book, just saw the movie ) Schuler??s odd version of the South, with integrated rooming houses and nightclubs run by crackers named...

...Harold C Schonberg, who can deliver the balanced judgment worthy of a New York Times man, went on a manic upswing in praising Hamburg's singing-acting He even praised Hamburg for not doing some things it definitely did He said bosoms are not heaved there and gesture is discreet, yet the ladies simply caromed about the stage in Act II of Jenifer and Baba and the chorus ran amok m The Rake long before the scene shifted to Bedlam...

...I was doubly glad that I heard them in performances as spited as those the Hamburgers gave Not even the pedantry of chief conductor Leopold Ludwig made the Hamburg State Philharmonic less than hyper-efficient How typical of the Met that its orchestra is only as good as the man before it...

...Equally generous were his comments on Hamburg's standard of vocalism "[It] is extremely high, much higher than the Metropolitan Opera (the superstars excepted) " If he means the chorus, I agree I'd like to hear Nadezda Kniplova, Enriqueta Tarres, Arlene Saunders, Hans Satin, Gerhard Unger and the world's most acrobatic tenor, Rag-knar Gulfing, at the Met But God keep me from the vocalism of Hubert Hofmann, who flatted with admirable consistency or the coarse, air-pocket sounds of McHenry Boatwright, Tatiana Trojans, Tom Blankenheim, and Kim Borg, a Met ex—as, alas, were Hamburg's fine singing actresses Annalisa Rosenberger and Kerstin Meyer...

...Hamburg's most welcome visit reminded New Yorkers what they had been missing in music criticism, as well as contemporary opera and well-rehearsed, tightly lout repertory performances The critics enthused so about Hamburg's uniqueness that little attention was paid the similarities between it and the Met Why is Hamburg so much better if the Met also shares the talents of designers Toe Otto and It Maximovna and directors Gain-Carlo Menotti and G??nter Rennet (Hamburg's general director till 1959)7 And is it that much better9 No one made much of the fact that Otto somehow managed...

...Bang??s sole virtue—he talks of no other—is selling out the house (99 per cent) It would seem a modest feat in a house 90 per cent subscribed by the greatest captive audience since Treblinka, but let us grant him that after 17 seasons He will probably answer "How do you follow the Hamburg State Opera7" by pointing to this season's fast accumulating collection of "Sold Out" stickers If it is any comfort, let me assure him that an opera house that passes up Jejuna and Lulu for Hansel und Gretel and Martha has just about sold out already...

...Tura wound in Since I recall no one praising Schuler for being a masterly orchestrator, I will, though I remind him that orchestration is noise until it's put to a musical purpose The standees' booing was as musical as anything I heard all night...

...The critical drought at the new Met broke m a deluge of praise when the Hamburgers appeared the last two weeks in June for Lemon Center Festival '67 This was New York's first chance to not only see a European company at full (300) strength but to hear six 20th-century operas rarely, or never, done here Gisele Klee??s Jacoboysky and the Colonel, Hindemith's Mathis deer Miler, Janacek's Jenifer, Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress, Berg's Lulu—anod even an American work commissioned by Hamburg's general manager Rolf Liebermann, The Visitation by G??nter Schuler The group's only concession to the 19th century was a concert version of Die Freischutz, done among the Noguchi-fungoid acoustical paneling of Philharmonic Hall The critics were unanimous They do no wrong in Hamburg...

...so help me'—AAngelo Pushy, was pretty far removed from the original, too So was the jolly Maximov-na-Rennert production, where drugstores looked like frontier bars and redneck stag parties ran off horny-ponies with Josef von Sternberg heroines...

...Big has remarked quite often that critics should be licensed It is a charming thought, yet having been victimized by licensed practitioners, from doctors and lawyers to dry cleaners and cabdrivers, I spot a flaw A test may detect the presence of critical virtues—coutrage, perception, taste, intelligence...

...to design Hamburg's best production {Jenifer, very well staged by Oscar Fritz Shah) and its silliest (Lulu, well staged by Rennet despite a light-hearted circus-type unit set that became increasingly irrelevant as Our Girl progressed from wags to wretches) Not even a fussy, unsightly Rake's Porgies, by Menotti and one Mario Chain, shook the critical consensus...

...but it cannot gauge them Only time tells A pity, since these are the virtues one would like to find in the general manager of the Met...

...A veritable vein of irony runs through the Meet??s dilemma Seventeen seasons under Rudolf Bing had done much to assure the success of a company like Liebermann's, which is a genuine repertory troupe devoted to opera as living art and vital theater Consider the Meet??s con...

...By Harris Green Hamburger Stakes attribution to Festival '67 a two-week stand of 18th- and 19th-century repertory, decked out in new productions that proved B H Hogg??s charge, "What Bing has done is to engage all the prominent designers around, good and bad, and accept whatever they did ". Last season was like a roller-coaster ride Up to the heights for Giaconda, an idiotic work lushly designed by Bern Montessori' Shoot-the-chute for Zauberflote, a great work hideously designed by the world's foremost creator of hand-painted ties, Marc Chagall This season, with the Met entered m what I cannot help but call the Hamburger Stakes, Carmen is to be at the mercy of the same Big-ape-proved production team that left dear old Faust looking like something by Hans Werner Hence There's a new production of Hansel und Gretel, too And even tottering Martha will be revived...

...It was a bit much, then, to have the New Yorker's Winthrop Sergeant, a most erratic gentleman, answer "How do you follow the Hamburg State Opera9" by telling Bing, in effect, "You probably can't Relax" Sergeant used to protest the Meet??s wholesale cast-shifting and poorly spaced performances, which do so much to reduce a prune production to hamburger (no compliment), but for some reason, he soddeny described these practices as "built-m " In a burst to resignation, Sergeant sighed that keeping the same cast around all season, as Hamburg does, "would probably mean the elimination of some big-name artists ". Why "big-name artists" and "superstars" have to stick around all season I cannot say, but they can be around for months on end, as Nilsson Ludwig, Berry, Vickers and Seep were last season This would seem ample time for a management that prides itself on its logistics and statistics (99 per cent capacity last season) to plan performances so closely together that an ensemble spirit could be maintained It seems rather poor strategy for a critic to hand excuses about "built-in" defects and vanishing big-names to a management like the Meet??s, which will plead anything but incompetence and artistic indifference That's as bad as a critic's confusing a trusting reader...

...As for that "third stream, it is a major waterway m only one sense It, too, is polluted Its elements never flowed together, they just en-snarled, and a ratty tangle it was, with Schuler??s vocal lame of droning parkland and seismographic color...