Lucullan Feast

Roger Sessions writes "difficult" music and likes it that way. When the headlines reported MODERNIST SYMPHONY BOOED, after his first Symphony was played in Philadelphia in 1935, he was delighted. When people called his Violin Concerto unplayable, he shrugged and looked around until he found himself a fiddler who could play it. Last week in Princeton, N.J., Sessions' long (75 minutes) one-act opera, The Trial of Lucullus, got its first hearing in the East. The score was, as usual, pretty tough going, but at least nobody booed.

The opera represents a courtroom trial in the afterworld, in which the newly dead Roman general Lucullus pleads his case for admission to the Elysian Fields. The libretto, originally written as a radio play in 1936, is by Germany's Red poet Bert (ThreePenny Opera) Brecht, but its only ideological message is antimili-tarism (the Communists condemned the text in 1951 as too "unpolitical"). In a stunning setting of blocks and planes, Lucullus faces a jury of five pale shades: courtesan, teacher, baker, farmer and fishwife. His character witnesses are stone-relief figures from the frieze that decorates his tomb.

They testify to his bloody military triumphs, his glorification of Rome and desecration of alien gods, his famous cuisine. But he gets little sympathy from the jury until one witness tells how the general brought a cherry tree from Asia and planted it in the Apennines; then the jury retires to consider his case, and it looks like limbo for Lucullus.

The work was performed by a fine semi-amateur company. The music was almost unrelieved dissonance, both in the 35-pIayer orchestra and in the singers' melodic lines. But it provided a Lucullan feast of varying moods, from the poignant ending of the courtesan's part ("For me, too, prodigious Rome/ Could not protect from prodigious Rome") to the heartbreaking aria of the bereaved fishwife. The fine unison chorus at the end was as rousing as a latter-day Verdi's, and the pure major triad that sang out as the curtain fell was a real shocker.

Nevertheless, Lucullus was difficult. Composer Sessions explains that his music is "of line, rather than of detail," and since today's listeners are accustomed to focusing on detail, they find it hard to follow. Sessions has never pushed performances of Lucullus or of any other work. Says he: "I like my work too much to go to anyone with a score under my arm." Sessions is getting played in spite of this attitude: his lurid suite from The Black Maskers was performed this season by the Boston Symphony and is scheduled to be played at Tanglewood, where he will teach composition this summer. He also has four recent commissions: a solo cantata, The Idyll of Theocritus (Louisville Orchestra); Symphony No. 3 (Boston Symphony); a Piano Concerto (Juilliard School) and an Anglican Mass (for Kent School).

Meanwhile, some of Sessions' early compositions, e.g., the "modernist symphony" and The Black Maskers (1923), have already passed from the realm of the fiendishly difficult to the comparatively easy, and seven of his works, including Symphony No. 2, are on LPs. He would not mind if the process continued. "Of course I would like my music to be liked by a great many people," he says. "It just doesn't work out that way."

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