Elvis Meets the Bacchae In Philadelphia, two new musicals -- or are they really operas?

By Michael Walsh

Anyone who has followed the course of recent contemporary music knows that musical theater is once again where the action is. Composers of all stripes are finding that the blend of playacting, poetry, stagecraft, dance and music can be as vital and communicative as it was 300 years ago in Renaissance Florence. The label for this art form -- originally opera, operetta, musical, even Broadway show latterly -- matters not. Nor does the increasingly arbitrary distinction between high art and pop culture: Stephen Sondheim's Pacific Overtures and Sweeney Todd, for example, have joined Gershwin's Porgy and Bess in the repertoires of English and American opera companies. It is a truth that the Viennese, who have always made room on their stage for both opera and operetta, have long understood: art is no respecter of venue.

For the past three years, Philadelphians have been in on the secret. The city's enterprising American Music Theater Festival has already revived Gershwin's lost Strike Up the Band, served as the proving ground for Anthony Davis' powerful first opera X (The Life and Times of Malcolm X) and unearthed Queenie Pie, the Duke Ellington "street opera" planned for a Broadway run early next year. Festival Directors Eric Salzman and Marjorie Samoff have become the foremost presenters of new and unusual music theater works in the country.

This season, which ended last week, was typically eclectic. Among the offerings were a musical setting of Mordecai Richler's brash comic novel The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and Composer Salzman's Stauf, an anagrammatical updating of the Faust legend co-written by Michael Sahl. The highlights, though, were The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, a moving minimalist meditation by British Composer Michael Nyman based on a case history in Neurologist Oliver Sacks' best seller, and Harry Partch's 1959 Revelation in the Courthouse Park, a quirky blending of Euripides and Elvis Presley, scored for an unorthodox orchestra and set to a musical scale with 43 tones instead of the normal twelve.

Because of its complexity and rarity, Revelation was the big attraction. Partch's own libretto alternates between two analogous fleshly rites: the orgiastic reception by female fans accorded to Dion (Obba Babatunde), a Presley symbol, and the lustful revels of the mythic Bacchae in praise of their priapic god, Dionysus. Each principal singer takes two roles. Mom (Suzanne Costallos) falls under the Pelvis' spell, just as her ancient Greek counterpart, Agave, is seduced by Dionysus. When Sonny (Christopher Durham) attempts to intervene, he is, in his alter ego of Pentheus, torn apart by the horde of crazed women.

The California-born Partch, who died in 1974, was a noteworthy iconoclast. Dissatisfied with the "tempered" method of tuning in use since the time of Bach, Partch sought a purer, just intonation based on the harmonic overtones that resonate naturally when any note is sounded. To make his microtones audible, Partch invented a series of exotic instruments constructed out of such objects as artillery shell casings and Pyrex jars.

The problem is that no matter how mathematically correct, just intonation sounds out of tune to those raised on the harmonic system of The Well-Tempered Clavier. The ear tends to seize on one note and make it a conventional tonal center; the other intervals become merely dissonant ornamentation to the composer's rather bland basic idiom of pop songs, pentatonic melodies and rock knock-offs. Ultimately, the expanded scale seems more trouble than it is worth, although it does add a piquant coloration to this authentically American oddity.

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, though, is a real discovery. Sacks' case history tells the story of Dr. P., a musician suffering from a type of agnosia, a gradual degeneration of the brain's ability to synthesize visual images into coherent wholes. Dr. P. could tell that a picture was a rectangle but could not describe what it represented. Somehow he managed to keep his bearings through music, especially that of Robert Schumann. Accordingly, Composer Nyman employs Schumann's song Ich grolle nicht from Dichterliebe as the musical subtext of his 70-minute chamber opera. Delicately scored for piano, harp and string quintet, Nyman's piece derives its insistent motor rhythm from the song's piano accompaniment and its harmonic structure from Schumann's distinctive use of the major seventh chord. To underscore this structural point, Dr. P. (Baritone Frederick Westcott) even sings the Schumann song to the Sacks-like Examiner (Tenor William Blankenship) halfway through the work.

Librettist Christopher Rawlence and Nyman, a former music critic, have turned what could have been harrowing melodrama into a poignant portrait. Things fall apart, but for a change the center holds and triumphs. Hat could be called an opera for people who think opera is too highbrow -- if it could not also be called a thinking man's musical. But in a work as fine as this, what does the terminology matter?