Of Ghosts & Soap

The problem in low-keyed contemporary opera is to convert the small change of daily life into glittering operatic gold. Some composers approach the challenge by advancing a closeup telecamera's eye on the commonplace; some retreat into fantasy or burlesque or the past. In two U.S. premieres last week, composers faced with the question came up with strikingly different answers:

P: British Composer Benjamin Britten's Turn of the Screw, presented by the New York College of Music, is based on Novielist Henry James's famed chiller about a young English governess fresh from a "small, smothered life" who fights to save her young charges from the evil designs of a pair of real or imaginary phantoms. As in the original, the dramatic effect of the opera depends on the gradual accretion of minute detail, the slow tightening of terror. But Librettist Myfanwy Piper departs from James in one important respect: the phantoms clearly exist, and there is no longer the possibility, suggested in the story, that the governess is merely suffering from erotic fancies. As a result, Britten's Turn of the Screw becomes a mere scamper through a haunted house, and it lacks the big moments of vocal melodrama that such a period thriller demands. To its 16 quickly flitting scenes, Britten has fitted a fluent, energetic score spiced with gaudy percussion and agitatedly brilliant orchestral effects. There are some gorgeous moments: the scene in the churchyard, where the rolling, Oriental sound of bells ominously underscores the children's hymn of praise; Miles's piano lesson, in which he replies to the governess' soaring, anguished questions in a series of nimble keyboard arabesques; the florid tenor solo, in which the phantom calls to Miles against graceful chords and arpeggios. But the limited range of the voices (four sopranos, a boy treble, two tenors) becomes monotonous, and the rambling brilliance of the orchestration obscures the climax of James's tale. Too often Britten's Screw loses its thread.

P: Douglas Moore's Gallantry: A Soap Opera, produced at Columbia University's Brander Matthews Theater, is a tuneful romp through the world of the daytime TV serial. The libretto by Arnold Sundgaard picks up "another chapter in Gallantry, the true-time story of hope and folly," at the point where a married doctor is pursuing his beautiful nurse, who in turn is in love with one Donald Hopewell. The nurse discourages the doctor with a wallop ("Touche, Miss Markham; I deserved that"), and the etherized Donald is saved just as the doctor is about to put him under the knife. The curtain rings down as the principals alternate a love duet with commercials for Lochinvar ("the soap of silken supremacy") and Billy Boy Wax ("the waxy wax that spells relax"). The action unfolds to the accompaniment of some thunderous cliches: "You remind me of someone I knew long, long ago"; "Love is just the most important thing that can happen to a person"; "Beneath that smiling mask stands the soul of a beast." For this pastiche Composer Moore (The Devil and Daniel Webster, Giants in the Earth) wrote a score that is alternately jazzy and sugary, but that in itself every so often sounds embarrassingly "sincere." While the nurse administers the ether, she bends over her patient-lover and croons a melting lullaby ("Sleep, my love") that leaves the audience wondering whether composer and librettist have swallowed their own commercial.

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