Montemezzi's Zoraima

When Composer Italo Montemezzi wrote L'Amore dei Tre Re, Poet Sem Benelli provided him with a libretto which cried for music of exquisite passion and tenderness. The fact that parts of it recall the music of Tristan & Isolde never seemed important. Montemezzi's score has surge and spontaneity of its own, enough to arouse high hopes for his one-act La Notte di Zoraima (The Night of Zoraima), given its U. S. premiere last week at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House.

In every way Zoraima disappointed. The setting among the Incas of 16th Century Peru was new for opera but the story was just another version of the one where the soprano saves the tenor by promising herself to the baritone, then cheats by committing suicide and boasting about it beforehand. The soprano in this case was Rosa Ponselle who sang superbly but looked funny in a Pocahontas get-up luring the Spanish tyrant (Baritone Mario Basiola). The tenor was Brooklyn-born Frederick Jagel who increased his stature but not his dignity by wearing an enormous headpiece ludicrously like the Mad Hatter's.

No one had music of any deep emotional content. Choruses had momentum but little real vitality. The love music was pallid and unaffecting compared with L'Amore, where Fiora forgets even the stalking blind king who she knows is coming to kill her. In a box last week sat Mary Garden, greatest of Fioras, with Signora Montemezzi, whose husband would appear more & more to be a one-opera composer.

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