Wallenstein's Seven

Beginning this week seven American operas --seldom heard even sandwiched in between Aidas and Carmens --will be performed in a seven weeks' row --the first cycle of native opera ever to be given in the U.S. Put on in condensed, hour-long versions by Manhattan's station WOR in cooperation with the Treasury Department (to boost war bond sales), broadcast by a nationwide Mutual network (Thursdays, 8 to 9 p.m. E.W.T.), the series is a brainchild of Alfred Wallenstein, WOR's ebullient, businesslike music director.

Conductor Wallenstein pored over 120 operas, picked what he thought were the most artistic, entertaining, representative. To start the series, he shrewdly selected the best-liked U.S. folk opera: George Gershwin's jazz-flavored saga of Charleston's Catfish Row, Porgy & Bess, now a smash hit in its Manhattan revival. To get the Broadway cast, headed by Anne Brown and Todd Duncan, arrangements had to be made to hold the theater curtain until 9:10 p.m.

The other operas to come: The Devil and Daniel Webster, Stephen Vincent Benet's Faustian tale of a New Hampshire farmer who sold out to the devil, set to music by Columbia Professor Douglas Moore; Gian-Carlo Menotti's The Old Maid and the Thief, a deft, bubbling radio opera commissioned by NBC, first given in 1939; Four Saints in Three Acts, with Virgil Thomson's gravely melodious music to Gertrude Stein's nonsensical words; Tennessee's Partner, a Quinto Maganini opera on a Bret Harte short story, which has lain unperformed, unorchestrated since 1934; Aaron Copland's play-opera for schools. The Second Hurricane; Deems Taylor's Metropolitan success of 1927, The King's Henchman.

Wallenstein chose the operas partly because of their typically American stories: a twangy, New Hampshire folk tale, a whimsical romance of small-town spinsters, adventures of school-age moppets caught in a hurricane, a wry story of the rough, shambling California gold-rush days. The King's Henchman, with its olde-English Aethelwold and Aelfrida, is the only .opera definitely not of the U.S. For The Second Hurricane Wallenstein has assembled a troupe of children, for Four Saints the original all-Negro cast.

Chicago-born Alfred Wallenstein is the fifth-great-grandnephew of famed General Albrecht Wenzel Eusebius von Wallenstein, who made history by his fighting in the Thirty Years' War, which ruined Europe a good bit more than World War II to date. When he was eight, Alfred asked for a bicycle, could find none with a coaster brake, so picked a shiny cello in Lyon & Healy's window. He became a prodigy, at 15 toured with Dancer Anna Pavlova, later played with the San Francisco and Chicago Symphony Orchestras, was first cellist of the New York Philharmonic-Symphony under Toscanini for seven years.

The "first American opera festival" is one of several plums which brisk, boyish Conductor Wallenstein has pulled out of his radio pie since he became WOR's music director in 1935. He ran through a two-year cycle of 103 Bach cantatas, sung on the Sundays for which Bach had composed them. With Pianist Nadia Reisenberg he played all of Mozart's 26 piano concertos. Two years ago he won critical acclaim for a series of nine Mozart operas. A consistent champion of new music, he has given more than a thousand first U.S. performances. He spends two hours a day looking over scores, examines 2.500 a year. As WOR's music director he shapes its policies, hires musicians, plans musical schedules. A lion for work, he plunges through many a seven-day week. About once in two months he finds time to visit his 200-year-old Colonial farmhouse in Holmdel, NJ.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.