Music: Where There's a Will...

Oldtimers at the Metropolitan Opera knew McNair Ilgenfritz only as the man who regularly rented Box No. 1. Other people recognized him as a retiring little man who wore spats and a bowler set at a rather rakish angle, and spent his life commuting between Paris, Newport and Philadelphia. They also knew that he liked to write music, and that he played the piano at parties and played well.

As it happened, music was a passion with McNair Ilgenfritz. With an income from real-estate holdings in Sedalia, Mo., he was free to compose. When he was still in his 20s, he wrote a popular piece called The Hesitation Waltz for a dance that came along just after the Bunny Hug. As the years passed, he wrote (and published) dozens of songs and began to reach for the more ambitious forms of composition. In 1944 he submitted a pair of operas to the Met, one of them based on Racine's Phèdre, the other a one-acter from Coppée's Le Passant (The Passerby), whose plot might have been taken from his own wandering life.

Last spring, at 66, Composer Ilgenfritz died without hearing whether or not the Met liked his operas. But he saw to it that the opera would not forget about them: he left the Met the bulk of his estate on condition that it would perform one of them. Last week an inventory of the estate was filed, and it appeared that the Met was in line for some $150,000 if it met Composer Ilgenfritz' condition.

Officials ransacked the Met library, dusted off the scores and found that Le Passant was not only workable music, but that since it had only one act and two characters, it could be produced for operatic peanuts. The chronically strapped Met is now talking seriously of producing the work season after next.