directory  |  sites  |  press        Submit Site  |  Submit Press Release

	Enter your search terms Submit search form
	Web usoperaweb.com

On February 8, 1934, in New Haven, Connecticut, before an audience The New York Times described as “highly sophisticated and curious,” Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein’s Four Saints in Three Acts confounded and delighted for the first time. It traveled to Broadway two weeks later where it played for 48 performances. Nine months later, George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess previewed in Boston and then debuted on Broadway and ran for 124 performances. The arrival of these two works created a miniature stir at the time; later they would come to be regarded as major landmarks along America’s journey toward an operatic identity. Ms. Stein abandoned traditional operatic storytelling (if she had thought of it to begin with) and created what might be called the first cubist libretto. Mr. Thomson’s four-square music, rather than sounding hackneyed, somehow made it all feel ultramodern. Gershwin’s opera had a conventional story but was unique for its jazzy, all-American score. Separately and together, they made a clean break from the Western European formula that had defined American opera to this point. Coincidentally, both operas were performed by African-American casts, further establishing them as renegade works. That they appeared outside the opera house was also profound. The most interesting American opera/lyric-theater/music-drama/call-it-what-you-will composers of the era—Marc Blitzstein, Leonard Bernstein and a new American, Kurt Weill, for example-were finding their voices not in the opera house but in the so-called musical theater. The Met would take up Four Saints in Three Acts and Porgy and Bess eventually, but before that Gian Carlo Menotti, Igor Stravinsky, Samuel Barber, and others would aim for operatic greatness in the house.

A New Era

Edward Johnson assumed the leadership of the Metropolitan at the beginning of the 1935-36 season. He had no experience in the day-to-day governing of a large institution and was not even the first choice to succeed Gatti-Casazza—Herbert Witherspoon had been the anointed successor but had died before he could begin the job. Johnson’s tenure with the company would have to be termed a success if for no other reason than his guidance of the company through the Depression and WWII.

In his second season, Johnson presented the U.S. premiere of Caponsacchi by Dutch-American composer/conductor Richard Hageman and the world premiere of Walter Damrosch’s The Man Without a Country. Hageman had been a coach at the Netherlands Opera when he was only sixteen and for a short time was an accompanist for Mathilde Marchesi in Paris. He arrived in the U.S. in 1906 and debuted on the Met’s podium two years later. He was a regular conductor at the Met until 1922; he also conducted opera companies in Chicago and Los Angeles and served as head of the opera department at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. Beginning in 1938, he worked in Hollywood as an actor (Rhapsody, The Great Caruso, The Fugitive) and a composer (She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Fort Apache, Mourning Becomes Electra, Stagecoach).

Librettist Arthur Goodrich adapted Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book for Hageman. Browning had discovered a parchment-bound book in a Florence book stall that told the story of the trial of an Italian nobleman, Guido Franceschini, for the murder of his wife, Pompilia, after she had eloped with the priest, Caponsacchi. Caponsacchi's world premiere took place at the Stadttheater of Freiburg-im-Breisgau (as Tragödie in Arezzo) on February 18, 1932; it enjoyed two subsequent productions in Europe before crossing the Atlantic.

The Met had hoped to present Caponsacchi a year earlier; however it had apparently proven to be “too exacting to be prepared in a short time.” (Times, January 31, 1937.) The premiere was scheduled for the January 30, 1937, matinee, which performance was to be broadcast via radio. "Unforeseen radio difficulties cropped up and the performance had to be put over until Thursday, leaving a break of a full week between dress rehearsal and premiere.” (Times, January 31, 1937.) Two days before said dress rehearsal, Lawrence Tibbett (known for his intense dramatic involvement in his roles) had accidentally stabbed Joseph Starzini, a chorus member. The Times reported on the dress rehearsal:

Mr. Tibbett at no time during the performance betrayed any signs of tension or uneasiness. Mr. Tibbett’s composure was particularly evident in the third act and the murder scene. Mr. Starzini’s role was essayed by Boris Godunoff, a member of the Metropolitan Opera chorus.

An autopsy performed on Mr. Starzini, who died five hours after the stabbing, disclosed that death was due to heart disease. Mr. Tibbett and Mr. Starzini had been close friends for a number of years. (Times, January 29, 1937.)

The opera was finally performed on February 4, 1937. Mario Chamlee sang the title role; Lawrence Tibbett was Guido and Norman Cordon was Pope Innocent XII. Singer, actress and Hollywood hopeful, Helen Jepson, played Pompilia. (Just as Ms. Jepson was beginning rehearsals, legal action was threatened against her by Grand National after she had signed a five-year contract with Samuel Goldwyn. Grand National claimed her manager had negotiated a one-picture contract with them via telegram, though nothing had been signed by either party. She would end up making The Goldwyn Follies in 1938, a lavish musical and an extravagant flop.) Hageman conducted; Désiré DeFrère directed and George Balanchine choreographed the ballet sequences; Fausto Cleva rehearsed the chorus.

Olin Downes reported:

The libretto…has a great many characters and episodes, more than most composers like to use. The question first and last is simply whether this material has given Mr. Hageman inspiration for a gripping and eloquent “music-drama.”…[H]is opera viewpoint is eclectic. This is shown in his score.

It is melodious and dextrous [sic] in a plausible way, following long-accepted operatic conventions. Mr. Hageman is not ashamed, and need not be, that he has attempted to write an opera that the public would like. In the end, all composers do this. His conception of what pleases the public is not the modern vein of harmony or of melodic declamation. He believes in ensemble numbers, a brilliant ballet (in which he uses an Italian folk tune suggested to him by Arturo Toscanini), solos of accepted patterns, and brilliant, sonorous orchestration.

...The opera presents incident, but not character, melodrama, rather than mood. The music, consistently, is exterior. There is no tonal characterization, which is something that we demand of music drama today.

...Pretty and plausible sounds emanate from Mr. Hageman, but they are singularly unoriginal. The score, for all intents and purposes, is a compendium of the styles of other opera composers*. But where is the flash of an idea?

...It was hard to take the melodrama seriously and it is surprising how English, which in most cases was admirably and clearly enunciated, can help to destroy illusion, if the line is not itself momentous or poetic. And how, under the circumstances, did the poetical aroma of Browning evaporate! (Times, February 5, 1937.)

Caponsacchi was presented once more during the season.

A Man Without a Country

Johnson awarded his first commission to Walter Damrosch, a known quantity in American music and a composer well connected to the Met. Damrosch had retired from conducting and other musical activities to devote his energies to composing. He told the Times, “I found while I was spending most of my time conducting that it was difficult for me to find my own individual expression. I was too much steeped in the works of others.” (Times, June 3, 1936.) Four months later the Metropolitan announced that it would produce Damrosch’s third opera, A Man Without a Country, written to poet/lyricist Arthur Guiterman’s libretto, after a story by Edward Everett Hale that had appeared originally in Atlantic Monthly in December 1863.

The idea of making an opera of this American heroic tale had come to Damrosch twenty years earlier. When he finally sat down to write it, he found the original story lacking dramatically and thus created a new scenario that included a love-interest and a different ending. Philip Nolan, a young Marine lieutenant, is in love with Mary Ruttledge and hopes to marry her. To impress her, he becomes involved with Aaron Burr in a money-making scheme that turns out to be an elaborate con. Nolan is court-martialed for his crime and at his trial he denounces the U.S. He is sent into exile. Mary resolves to gain his freedom and restore his name. Nolan is freed but can find redemption only in sacrifice. Vowing to serve his country again he goes off to battle and is killed.

In preparing his opera, Damrosch looked backward to simpler forms, particularly Beethoven’s Fidelio, in which plot is carried along by spoken word and characters’ inner thoughts are intoned in arias, ensembles and choruses. He was also concerned that a common standard of pronunciation be established “so that English shall sound noble when sung.” (Times, April 20, 1937.) The Man Without a Country premiered on May 12, 1937, in a special spring season. Damrosch conducted; English tenor Arthur Carron was Nolan; Americans took the other leading roles: Helen Traubel was Mary, Joseph Royer was Aaron, George Rasely was Blennerhassett and John Gurney played Colonel Morgan; the director was Desire Defrère. The first night audience was ecstatic over the opera. Damrosch was called to the stage after the first act but refused to take a curtain call, instead applauding the cast from the orchestra pit. At the end of the opera, he finally was dragged on stage for a bow. After calls for a speech, the composer addressed the audience, thanking the Met and its various officials and complimenting the performers. He ended by saying that several weeks before the premiere he had been “quite despondent about having such little time left to write.” But, composer and critic Deems Taylor had reminded him that Verdi had written Falstaff at age 80, which encouraged Damrosch to continue writing. (Times, May 13, 1937.)

The opera’s notices were mostly positive, some even enthusiastic. Echoing the reaction to many previous American operas, the event was thought a success even while the work itself was not found to be unique or memorable. Olin Downes noted the resonance the original source work had for its readers:

[T]he inferences to be drawn from the reference to the Aaron Burr conspiracy in the early nineteenth century, and the lot of the unfortunate man, hypnotized by Burr’s specious tongue, who, in a moment of irritation cursed his country, dealt with matters profound and urgent in 1863.

The time of its appearance was that of the Civil War. Patriotism was more than a word to be misappropriated by professional Red-baiters and demagogues or ridiculed by soap-box orators and parlor Bolsheviki. It was a blazing issue. (Times, May 13, 1937.)

But he found the opera to be “frivolous."

It is a work calculated to entertain, if it meets the hearer’s taste, rather than to move him or arrest his attention by originality. It is an opera of set numbers, conventional lines and expert but very ordinary music.

[...] Mr. Guiterman, who long since earned fairly the rank of poet of the obvious, has not relinquished that distinction by anything to be found in these pages. In fact, by taking apparently many a leaf from the tomes of various writers of light opera ditties and jingles he has advanced in this chosen direction.

"Sighing” and “dying” may, it is true, be as defensible as “amore” and "dolore,” on which more than one eighteenth century Italian opera composer has written a fine tune. The point is, that in such case the tune must rise superior to the text and that, today, a text of more quality is usually necessary to inspire a composer. (Times, May 13, 1937.)

Of the music, Lawrence Gilman added:

Mr. Damrosch has dealt simply and unpretentiously with a simple and unpretentious tale. He has not attempted to give us a music-drama a la Richard (Strauss or Wagner). He has paid no heed to the siren temptings of the ultra-modernist composers. Mr. Damrosch, in 1937, writes as though Berg and Schönberg and Hindemith had never set pen to music-paper... (Herald Tribune, May 13, 1937.)

The Man Without a Country played three more times that month and was revived once during the following season. Also notable during the season were the additions to the Met’s roster of director Herbert Graf, mezzo-soprano Kerstin Thorborg, soprano Bidú Sayao and baritone John Brownlee. Wagnerian goddess Kirsten Flagstad sang consecutive performances on March 2, 3, and 4 of Götterdämmerung, Lohengrin, and Tristan and Isolde.

The New Rossini

Gian Carlo Menotti was born in Cadegliano, Italy, and displayed musical talent at an early age. Upon completion of his musical studies at the Milan Conservatory, Gian Carlo and his mother immigrated to the U.S. (his father had died a few months earlier). He met composer and teacher Rosario Scalero, who arranged a scholarship to the Curtis Institute for young Gian Carlo.

Menotti wrote his first opera while still at student at Curtis. In what would be the beginning of a life-long habit, he penned his own original libretto for Amelia Goes to the Ball (in Italian as Amelia al Ballo). In her Milan apartment, Amelia is preparing to go to the ball when her husband arrives to accuse her of having an affair. He demands to know the man’s name but Amelia agrees to tell him only if he promises to take her to the ball regardless. When Amelia reveals that her lover is the upstairs neighbor, her husband leaves to shoot the man. Amelia goes to the balcony to warn the neighbor, who climbs down to Amelia’s apartment via a rope. He begs Amelia to flee with him but she refuses until after the ball. The husband returns, discovers the rope and finds the lover hiding. He draws his gun and it misfires. The two men engage in an argument. Amelia breaks a vase over her husband’s head and yells for help. The Chief of Police arrives and Amelia tells him that a burglar broke in and attempted to rob her and knocked out her husband. The lover is taken to jail and the Chief of Police escorts Amelia to the ball.

The world premiere was given at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia (April 1, 1937) in an English translation by George Mead; it shared a double bill with Darius Milhaud’s La Pauvre Matelot. Conductor Fritz Reiner took it to New York ten days later for a benefit performance at the Henry Street Settlement Music School. Howard Taubman reported on the New York premiere:

The hero of the occasion…was young Gian-Carlo Menotti. The composer of “Amelia al Ballo” is a mere 25, but he writes for the stage like one to the manner born. Forgetting for the moment the excesses and deficiencies of youth and a maiden operatic effort, one must credit this work with wit, assurance and communicative spirits. The effects come off, more often than not. This boy has the gusto, the audacity and the talent of a comer. (Times, April 12, 1937.)

Amelia's success reached the ears of Mr. Johnson and he put it on the following season's schedule. Amelia Goes to the Ball bowed at the Met on March 3, 1938, in the Philadelphia production; Panizza conducted; Muriel Dickson was Amelia, Mario Chamlee played the Lover, John Brownlee was the Husband. (Oddly enough, in both the Curtis and Met performances the opera was titled Amelia al ballo, even though it was performed in English.) Olin Downes was impressed:

The Metropolitan Opera Company produced a work in the lighter vein last night by a young composer who has made an extremely brilliant and amusing start as a musician of the lyric theatre….

There is something here, as it must tearfully be admitted, that has not materialized so far from an American-born composer. This is dramatic music, and it is vocal music. The flexibility and spontaneity of the score is inborn. The recitative, which is sometimes spoken and sometimes sung, does not make the English language sound stupid or futile in the mouths of the singers. Mr. Menotti has done striking things with his form.

The music, since it is genuine, is fundamentally Italian in texture and spirit. The manner is the composer’s birthright. It is natural and instinctive for him to write that way, clearly, dexterously, melodically and with laughter. This is interesting; his set pieces, his hits, sometimes amusing because of the text and method of setting it to music, are nevertheless among the least distinguished pages. What is fascinating is the dramatic continuousness of the musical fabric, the swift tonal punctuation of all that goes on, on the stage, the adroit characterization, the capacity to combine all the musical elements in ensemble movements which are so gay, and which come so directly from the architectural triumph of Italian light opera—the concerted finale.

...The opera, from the standpoint of a great opera house, has defects of structure and inexperience. It is too small a work for the large stage. The score is uneven in the quality of its invention.

...The cast was ideally headed by Muriel Dickson, whose diction and singing were exemplary…. The orchestration is much too heavy and pretentious for the material of the music, nor did Mr. Panizza save the composer from the consequences, on this occasion, of his actions. The orchestra was much too loud for the subject and the scene. The ensemble was excellent. The opera…gave great pleasure. After the curtain the composer was repeatedly called before it. He had reason for self-congratulation. (Times, March 4, 1938.)

On opening night Amelia was followed by R. Strauss’s Elektra. The opera was given six additional performances over two seasons, sharing the stage with Strauss’s Salome or Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Golden Cockerel. Amelia was extremely popular over the next three decades; the New York City Opera performed it often, as did many U.S. companies. Performances are common still, making it the first American opera at the Met to earn a place in the repertory. The 1937-38 season also marked the debut of American mezzo-soprano Risë Stevens and Yugoslavian soprano Zinka Milanov.

The late ‘30s and early ‘40s were austere times at the Met. New productions slowed to one per season. The 1941-42 season opened on November 24. Thirteen days later Pearl Harbor was bombed and the U.S. entered WWII. Many European artists were unable to appear with the company and Puccini’s Japanoise opera Madame Butterfly was dropped from the repertory for the duration of the war.

More Menotti

Dubbed the “new Rossini” after only two operas (his second, The Old Maid and the Thief, had been a successful radio opera that would prove popular onstage in the ‘40s and ‘50s), Menotti had learned already to complain of lack of interest in new works. He told Opera News,

Why is it that the New York public, so cosmopolitan and super-musical, has so little thirst for the new operas? Is it that people go to the opera more to hear singers than they do to listen to the music? Now that great singers are becoming more and more rare, it may be that audiences will interest themselves more in the music. It is very much to be hoped that this will be the case. (Opera News, February 16, 1942.)

The Met gave the world premiere of Menotti’s third opera, The Island God, on February 20, 1942. The Island God was composed in Italian (Ilo e Zeus) and performed in an English translation by Fleming McLeish. Menotti devised his own scenario and wrote the libretto. Ilo and Telea flee to an uninhabited Mediterranean island where Ilo brings to life the stone image of a god who demands the restoration of his temple. Ilo agrees to this labor but is kept so busy Telea has to find company with Luca, a young fisherman who appears (from nowhere). Ilo discovers the clandestine couple and banishes them from the island; but he is left alone to realize that the god cannot offer him sanctuary or freedom from human passion. Ilo denounces the god and perishes.

American (and Hollywood) baritone Leonard Warren was Ilo, Astrid Varnay played Telea, Norman Cordon was the Greek God, Raoul Jobin was Luca and John Carter was the voice of another fisherman; Maestro Panizza conducted. The Island God earned some of the worst notices of any Met premiere since the American experiment had begun. Reviewers found the story dull and the music stagnant. Even Menotti's Puccini-esque melodies failed to relieve the tedium. The opera was presented four times, paired thrice with Pagliacci, once with La Bohème. After the final performance Menotti withdrew it and destroyed all copies of the score.

No Saint-Saëns

Bernard Rogers was born in New York City and studied piano as a child. He was a lover of poetry and art and at various times was a painter, an architect, a composer and a teacher. He studied composition with Ernest Bloch in Cleveland, Frank Bridge in England and Nadia Boulanger in France and as a teacher at the Eastman School he taught David Diamond, Dominick Argento, Robert Ward, Jack Beeson and William Bergsma. He composed four operas, the second of which, The Warrior, won the 1946 Alice M. Ditson Fund Contest , a competition sponsored by Columbia University for new American short operas. Under the terms of the contest, the Metropolitan held a one-year option to present the opera’s first performance, which they exercised for the 1946-47 season.

The Warrior was based on the story of Samson and Delilah and had a libretto by Norman Corwin, a Boston radio writer. Corwin took his inspiration from the Bible, Judges XVI:16-23, but acknowledged having “written a variation on an old folk theme, developing character at my pleasure…. The play is one of shifting atmospheres: it vacillates between the candlelight of private happenings and the harsh glare of public celebration.” (Times, January 5, 1947.) Rogers was drawn to Claude Debussy, particularly his opera Pelléas et Mélisande, but also was attempting to resurrect the recitative-heavy style of the pre-Monteverdi operas of the Florentine Camerata. "It is not a conventional score with arias and recitatives,” explained Rogers. “The vocal writing is 'parlando,' practically throughout. It is in song-speech style. The vocal line is strictly subservient to the text and not a melodic expansion of it.” (Times, January 5, 1947.)

The 1946-47 season saw the creation of Metropolitan Opera Guild Production Fund “to do new works [and] re-study and dress up old ones…which ha[ve] been handicapped from the start by lack of money.” (Edward Johnson, NY Times, January 5, 1947.) The world premiere of The Warrior, made possible by the fund, took place on January 11, 1947, with Mack Harrell in the role of Samson and Regina Resnik as Delilah; Max Rudolf conducted. Six days before the premiere, Johnson issued a statement in the Times, counseling the public on how it should approach a new opera: "It seems to me that it is not just to react to any new work with a simple ‘I like it’ or ‘I do not like it’ approach. It would be better if the listener tried to balance his judgment on the basis of several factors. After all, an opera has many elements—drama, singing, acting, sets, lights, dancing, chorus and orchestra.” He provided the listener with ten questions to ask himself when hearing a work for the first time, and declared, “We feel the need also to encourage native composers. However, a work of art must have a universal quality and the judgment of the music-loving public must be the court of final appeal.” (Times, January 5, 1947.)

Unfortunately the opera did not live up to its creators’ aspirations or its presenters’ hopes. Mr. Downes broke the bad the news:

It is not easy or particularly pleasant to write of the new American opera, “The Warrior”…which received its first performance, and simultaneously its first radio broadcast, yesterday afternoon at the Metropolitan Opera House.

For there is no particular use beating the bush about it: this is a singularly weak and ineffectual opera, so weak and ineffectual, so strikingly without inspiration or dramatic intensity, that one can only wonder why a jury of eminent authorities should have given it the Alice M. Ditson prize, and why, even on the basis of such endorsement, the Metropolitan should have produced it. (Times, January 12, 1947.)

A week later, Downes questioned the process by which the opera made it to the Met’s stage:

The general verdict upon the opera “The Warrior” … was so adverse that many people, the writer among them, raised the question, reiterated by several of our correspondents, as to why this work, so conspicuously ineffective and invertebrate in its nature, should have been given a prize, or should have been performed by the Metropolitan.

These are important questions, having less to do with an unsuccessful première than the whole prospect of native opera and the means taken to secure that much desired product by prize committees, opera companies or other institutions concerned in the matter.

...It is perfectly true the twenty-odd native operas and ballets thus far produced at Broadway and Thirty-ninth Street have not revealed a single work that has remained in the repertory. It is also true, and it was felt strongly by the late Giulio Gatti-Casazza, who reigned at the Metropolitan during its most brilliant period, that the Metropolitan owned it to America’s prospective composer to opera to aid them.

In the course of his long regime Gatti-Casazza produced a total of eighteen American operas and ballets. The best of these were not only more numerous but of considerably more substance than any of the meager pieces that have been staged since Gatti departed.

...No progress…has been made on the Metropolitan stage in the last decade because of the prevailing neglect of American composition and the fact that American opera has never been taken there as seriously as it was by Gatti-Casazza.

...Interesting American operas should be found. It does not suffice to pick up the opera that lies nearest and accept it on grounds of convenience…. The search for new works should be pursued with long-range planning and discrimination.

...There are all too few places in America where the American composer and librettist can learn his business: for that very reason the Metropolitan should expend its best brains in meeting this situation; in affording stimulus and opportunity for young talent to approach in fresh ways the creative problems of the music-drama. The world needs badly additions to the repertory of worth-while operas. This is also the field in which the American composer urgently requires experience and self-expression. (Times, January 19, 1947.)

At its first performance, The Warrior was followed by Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel in a new English translation. (For many years, it was not unusual for the Met to present in a single evening works thought incompatible by today’s standards together. Salome, Elektra, Pagliacci, Cavalleria Rusticana, The Golden Cockerel, Hansel and Gretel, Don Pasquale, Carmina Burana, and even La Bohème were all candidates for pairing, depending more on the available of the company’s artists than on any musical or dramatic congruousness.) The opera received its second and final performance twenty days later. The season marked the company debuts of two American singers, bass Jerome Hines and mezzo-soprano/movie star Claramae Turner (for whom Tony Bennett wrote "I left my heart in San Francisco"). The Johnson era came to an end fifteen seasons after it had begun and history would not record its American opera efforts as auspicious or productive.

Bing’s World

Rudolf Bing arrived to guide the Met for the 1950-51 season and for the next twenty-two years oversaw an artistic renovation of the company that coincided with a golden age in singing. An Austrian by birth, Bing had taken British citizenship and gained his experience leading the Edinburgh and Glyndebourne Festivals. As soon as he arrived at the Met, he embarked on a major overhaul of the company’s production values. No longer would singers stand in front of interchangeable painted backdrops wearing their own costumes and presenting stock portrayals of characters. Bing invited theater and film directors and designers to work at the Met and develop unique productions—specific visual and dramatic interpretations that concentrated on character and psychological underpinnings as much as on the music. He added African-American singers to the roster for the first time (Marian Anderson and Robert McFerrin in 1955, followed by Mattiwilda Dobbs, Gloria Davy, Martina Arroyo, George Shirley and Leontyne Price in later years). Producing American opera, however, was not a top priority. (He was also accused of snubbing American singers in favor of their European counterparts.) Bing’s first foray into the realm of contemporary opera was to present the U.S. premiere of The Rake’s Progess by Igor Stravinsky.

American opera, a digression

Is The Rake’s Progress an American opera? Its composer was Russian-born; its librettists British and American. It was inspired by the engravings of an English artist and written in the style of an Austrian composer. It received its world premiere in Venice, Italy, with a multinational cast. In subject or sound there is nothing “American” about The Rake’s Progress.

Stravinsky moved to France in his early 30s and eventually took French citizenship. His three best-known works-The Firebird, Petroushka, The Rite of Spring-premiered in western Europe. He married Vera Sudeikina, with whom he had been in love for twenty years, in Boston in 1940 and the couple moved to West Hollywood in 1941; Stravinsky took American citizenship in 1945. The impulse to write The Rake’s Progress coincided with his arrival in the U.S. and a desire to write an opera in English. Placing his name on a list that includes Johns Adams, Dominick Argento, Jack Beeson, Marc Blitzstein, Carlisle Floyd and George Gershwin, however, poses an interesting question: what makes a composer and his opera American?

And what to do with Menotti, an Italian-born, American composer who actually wrote several of his operas in Italian and is acknowledged for writing almost completely in the Italian verismo style? Yet, three Menotti works are high on the American opera list: Amahl and the Night Visitors (1951) first appeared on NBC and took off to become a perennial Christmas crowd-pleaser; The Consul (1950) and The Saint of Bleeker Street (1955) were written in English on American subjects, premiered on Broadway and won Pulitzer prizes in their respective years of composition.

Kurt Weill immigrated to the U.S. (from Germany) in 1935 where he embraced American music and wrote several ground-breaking shows for the Broadway stage. His best known work, The Three Penny Opera (1929), was written in German and premiered in Berlin; after Weill came to the U.S. it was translated by Marc Blitzstein into English and enjoyed tremendous success on Broadway. The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1930) might have been composed in German (Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny), but it is American to the core. (More about this later.) Weill’s true American opera, Street Scene, was written to words by the African-American poet, Langston Hughes. (A visit to the Kurt Weill Foundation website (www.kwf.org) reveals that many of his stage works (in German and English) are listed as both operas and musicals.)

Then there are Franco Leoni’s The Oracle and Puccini’s The Girl of the Golden West, neither of which are ever thought of as American operas, anymore than the latter composer’s Turandot is considered a Chinese opera. Incidentally, the issue is not a new one: G.F. Händel was born in Germany and wrote Italian operas and English oratorios. Likewise, C.W. Glück was born in Vienna, gained his early fame in Italy but ended up making a revolution in French opera.

Back to Stravinsky

U.S. premiere of Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress (1953) with Hilda Gueden (Anne Trulove), Blanche Thebom (Baba the Turk), Paul Franke (Selem). Metropolitan Opera Archives.

As the son and brother of famous Russian operatic basses and the student of one of Russia’s most prolific opera composers (Rimsky-Korsakov) one might have assumed that Igor Stravinsky would focus his energies on the lyric stage. Though he wrote several ballets as well as some interesting music-theater works (Les Noces, Le Rossignol, Oedipus Rex, Mavra, among them), he made only one evening-length opera: The Rake’s Progress.

Upon arriving in the U.S. in 1940, Stravinsky began to think about writing an opera in English. After viewing the engravings of William Hogarth at the Chicago Art Institute in 1947, Stravinsky was inspired to turn their narrative into an opera. He mentioned the notion to his California neighbor, Aldous Huxley , who suggested W.H. Auden as a librettist. Together, Stravinsky and Auden worked out a scenario and Auden and his companion, Chester Kallman, wrote the libretto. It was at this time that Stravinsky met Robert Craft who would become his assistant and disciple numero uno. Craft was entrusted with reading the libretto out loud so that Stravinsky could hear in idiomatic American English the proper accentuation and intonation of the text. Stravinsky began composing The Rake’s Progress in 1947 and completed it in 1951. An interesting anomaly for the money-obsessed composer: Stravinsky wrote The Rake’s Progress without a commission or promise of a performance (although he had received an advance from his publishers, Boosey & Hawkes).

The story of the opera owes at least a nod to the Faust legend. Rather than settle down to a good job so that he can marry Anne Trulove, Tom Rakewell wishes to make his fortune an easier way. Nick Shadow appears to deliver the news that Tom has received a large inheritance from a long-lost uncle and offers to assist Tom in establishing himself in London. Nick will name his price for services rendered in one year’s time. In London, Tom is easily tempted into a life of decadence. He marries Baba the Turk and embarks on a manufacturing enterprise with Nick. The marriage is a failure; the business goes bust and Tom is ruined. A year has passed and Nick demands as payment Tom’s soul. Alone and broke, Tom descends into madness.

The Venice Festival of Contemporary Music bought the rights to The Rake’s Progress and presented the world premiere on September 11, 1951. Elizabeth Schwarzkopf was Anne Trulove, Robert Rounseville (who would go on to sing Leonard Bernstein’s Candide on Broadway) was Tom Rakewell, Otakar Kraus was Nick Shadow and Jennie Tourel was Baba the Turk; Ferdinand Leitner conducted. Not since the halcyon days of Verdi did an opera enjoy such a success. If critics were divided on the opera’s merits, in part owing to the neoclassical musical language employed by the composer (he practically plagiarized Mozart), producers and audiences embraced the work enthusiastically. In its first year of life, The Rake’s Progress received sixteen productions in Europe.

When Bing announced that the Met would present The Rake’s Progress during the 1952-53 season, the New York press was giddy with excitement. Stravinsky was practically a celebrity in the U.S. and enjoyed more box office appeal than any other contemporary composer. The dress rehearsal took place before the composer and an audience of invited luminaries from the entertainment world as well as critics from every major U.S. newspaper and periodical. Two days later, at the Saturday, February 14, 1953, matinee, the Met gave the first U.S. performance of the opera. Eugene Conley and Hilda Güden were Tom Rakewell and Anne Truelove; Mack Harrell appeared as Nick Shadow and Norman Scott was Trulove; Blanche Thebom was Baba the Turk and Martha Lipton played Mother Goose (at later performances Jean Madeira took over the role of Baba and at the February 27 performance played both Baba and Mother Goose). Fritz Reiner conducted and George Balanchine staged the opera.

Many reviewers found the performance superior to the world premiere and felt they could finally judge the opera properly. They were fascinated with the libretto and its obvious bows to Faust, Peer Gynt and Don Giovanni. But, echoing critics of previous productions, the score was found to be more derivative than inspired. Its neoclassical pastiche made Mozart-lovers happy but didn’t sit too well with those wanting something more modern or original. Eight days after the premiere, Olin Downes considered the opera carefully:

[N]ow the tumult and the shouting are over. But not the contentions of the Stravinsky and anti-Stravinsky camps.

So we have again to thank Mr. Stravinsky for an argument, an issue, aside from the fact that in one particular if in none other he has made a definite contribution, by setting the text of a famous poet, to the cause of opera in English. How appropriate this setting is to the nature of the text, to what extent it exemplifies a fruitful union of English words and melodic writing, is yet to be determined. But another opera in English has aroused widespread attention and curiosity as to its nature and effectiveness, and this is certain to give additional stimulus to the cause of opera composed and not translated in the vernacular.

This may prove to be the work’s greatest value. We are not of those who are convinced by its esthetic principle, which we consider false, or by its virtuoso devices of craftsmanship, which do not in our opinion, make an opera that will endure in the theatre and leave its impress upon music in the future. Aside from the question of how strong or weak Stravinsky’s musical invention may be per se and therefore how successfully or otherwise it has fulfilled his express purpose, we think that the work is based upon an unsound artistic premise and that as a result it tries vainly to reconcile and integrate within itself disparate elements. The consequence, which we consider inevitable under the circumstances, is the shell and not the substance of an opera and one without a true reason for being.

...His proponents appear to point with pride to their master’s eclecticism of style, to its derivation from many different sources, and the amalgam of all these elements into an art form which is nevertheless alleged to be stamped with the impress of Stravinsky’s own creative personality; as though the fact that Stravinsky has stuck his thumb in the pies of Handel and Mozart, Bellini and Donizetti, Verdi and Mussorgsky, and pulled out their plums, crying, ‘What a good boy am I,’ constituted a creative achievement.

...We know of no composer who has produced living and enduring art by hugging the past to his bosom, hiding his head, as it were, in the sands of bygone formulas, and thus evading the issues and challenges of his day, and the employment of new force and new ideas to meet them. (Times, February 22, 1953.)

The Rake’s Progress was revived the followed season and then disappeared from the repertory until 1997-98, when it received a new production by Jonathan Miller. Dawn Upshaw (Anne), Denyce Graves (Baba), Jerry Hadley (Tom), David Pittsinger (Trulove) and Samuel Ramey Nick) sang; James Levine conducted. The opera returned in 2003 and has now received a total of 23 performances over four seasons. Fifty years’ passage has not quelled opposition to the opera. It’s probably safe to say that for the moment, though, The Rake’s Progress has a safe place in the repertory.

American Opera at the Met Part II: 1935-2003 - Continue to Page Two