"The First One"

Great stone cities slumber, long ruined, in the jungle bush of lower North America. In Mexico the Aztecs, in Yucatan the Mayans developed civilizations which declined and fell so long ago that little is known of them today. Their traditions, lingering in the stones and exhumed jewelry of their cities, are of an antiquity admirably suited to folklore and epic poetry. Hence Payambe, "The First One," a new Mexican opera.

The libretto--a tale of two city-states, Tuluum and Chichen-Itza, whose kings warred while a Tuluum prince loved a Chichen princess--was contrived by Don Luis Rosado Vega, Yucatan troubadour, once jailed for translating the Mexican constitution into Indian, now director of the Museum of History and Archaeology in Merida.

The four scenes were designed by young Juan G. Novelo. In the first scene, Tuluum is not the fortress-like ruin of that name on the Caribbean Sea but is revived with terraces, temples, palaces, facing inland against a background of green sea, blue sky. In the last scene, Chichen-Itza rears its pyramids from the dust of ages.

The music is by Fausto Pinedo, a Yucatecan who has adapted European methods of writing to the methods of Mexico's popular troubadour ballads. Under the Minister of Public Education's auspices, Payambe will soon be presented in Mexico City, probably at the Arbeu Theatre, for the great National Theatre, designed for the presentation of opera and drama, though conceived many years ago, is still incomplete.

That his country should have a national theatre was one of the ideas of the late many-minded Porfirio Diaz, onetime President of Mexico. Work on the gilded, white-marble, city-block-size structure, planned for the 1910 Mexican centennial, stopped in 1910 when Diaz was overthrown.

Elaborate, pretentious, built on undrained ground, sinking still beneath its own weight, it is bitterly referred to by many a Mexican as a symbol of the whole Diaz regime--grand in conception, fumbled in execution.

Its architect, like its architecture, was Italian: Adamo Boari. Other Latins and one Hungarian did some sculpture. A feature is the Tiffany glass screen--a glass mosaic fireproof curtain weighing 27 tons, academically decorated to illustrate the legend of volcanoes Ixtaccihuatl and Popocatepetl, Aztec lovers. When the theatre's site was excavated, workmen uncovered the steeple of a church which had sunk in the swampy ground. For months giant pumps injected concrete under the foundation, uselessly. The dome is unfinished but the structure has a roof. It is used for automobile shows, concerts. To raise more money the government once issued a special postage stamp. Most helpful have been the labor organizations which, for five years past, have labored slowly toward its completion.