Poor Opera, Good Singer

Manhattan's hidebound Metropolitan Opera Company hadn't tackled a new opera for five years, when it wheezed through one performance of Gian-Carlo Menotti's The Island God. The Met had done nothing about England's brilliant, 33-year-old Benjamin Britten, whose Peter Grimes has been heard and praised in five European cities and whose latest opera, The Rape of Lucretia, had gotten even better notices in England. With a long look down their noses. Met officials still decided to take no chances.

What it considers a good risk the Met demonstrated last week. It put on a new one-act opera, The Warrior, judged the best of over 100 manuscripts in a contest which the Met jointly sponsored with Columbia University. Composer Bernard Rogers had written it to a Norman Corwin radio play, Samson, and slavishly shaped his music to fit Corwin's blank verse. The result is a recitative parlando style, hardly operatic, without a single aria or lyrical line. As an atmospheric but not particularly melodious score, The Warrior had its moments; generally, however, it sounded like background music to a movie. It was a second-rate, bargain-basement job, inferior in score, plot and setting to Britten's Peter Grimes. By putting it on, the Met had made an inexpensive gesture to appease its critics.

Shorn & Blinded. Like a radio play, The Warrior is compressed into four staccato scenes, all played on one barren set. Barely an hour long, it begins with Samson's haircut and climaxes when Samson's eyes are put out.

Composer Rogers, 53, a composition teacher in the Eastman School of Music at Rochester, wrote his first opera, The Marriage of Aude, in 1932. Both Rogers and Librettist Corwin think of The Warrior as an allegory of modern times. Says Rogers:

"Delilah is a kind of fascist symbol; she rationalizes everything she does. Samson is a kind of Maxie Baer, an unintelligent strong man."

The Metropolitan's other big news of the week was the noisy debut of Ferruccio Tagliavini, a 33-year-old tenor from Milan's La Scala. Even before he sang a note of La Boheme, Tagliavini got a boisterous ovation. When he sang the great first act aria, Che gelide manina, the din would have filled Madison Square Garden. The loudest cheers came from members of the claque, most of them scattered among the standees--but a good many people in the $7.50 orchestra seats joined in.

The rest of the evening was spent in uneasy warfare between those who wanted to stop the show every time Tagliavini sang a note, and those who wanted to get on with the proceedings. Critics generally found Tagliavini a very good, if not yet great, tenor who used his lyric voice with natural grace and showed a warm feeling for character. Even the Herald Tribune's Virgil Thomson, usually the Met's sharpest critic, was impressed. He wrote: "He sings high and loud [and] does not gulp or gasp or gargle salt tears. . . . Not in a very long time have we heard tenor singing at once so easy and so adequate. . . . He even at one point sang a genuine open-throated pianissimo, the first I have heard in Thirty-Ninth Street since I started reviewing opera six years ago. . . . The wonderful thing took place. . . . Italian singing actors, working under an Italian conductor before an audience that was pretty largely Mediterranean, gave us real Italian opera."

Since the days of Gigli, Martinelli and Tito Schipa, the Met's Italian wing has been singing second place to the stronger-lunged Wagnerian team. Last week it appeared that the Italians might be on the way to a bel canto comeback.

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