Opera: Sad Savage

The millionaire's daughter is a Vassar girl, and she needs a noble savage for her life studies. A scheming maharajah helps her trap a fake abominable snowman, whom she brings caged to Chicago. She dresses him up like Rock Hudson, seduces him and shows him off to a menagerie of North Shore friends at a cocktail party. The savage flees to dwell in the jungle in earnest; the girl follows on the wings of love. Departing civilization in soulful triumph, she surrenders herself to life and love in a cave—even as native bearers carry into the jungle her bathtub, her refrigerator, her television set.

The preposterous plot is meant to be a mocking comment on contemporary society, and Composer Gian Carlo Menotti intended to blend it all into a witty comic opera. But when The Last Savage was given its world premiére at Paris' Opera-Comique last week, the satiric fun was blanketed with annoyed disappointment. In his first comedy since The Telephone in 1947, Menotti had fallen well below his usual mark, with a tiresome, lurching, seldom funny libretto and a derivative score that even in its academic jokes was hardly musique sérieuse.

The faults were not entirely Menotti's. The Paris Opera had commissioned a big, spectacular work from the composer five years ago. And when Menotti presented a huge opera bouffe, it was banished to the cramped Comique on the ground that it was too frivolous for France's official opera house. Menotti did his best to trim and squeeze his long work, but it came out looking starved instead. Paris was rightfully unimpressed ("Distressing, extremely poor, bordering on indigence," wrote Le Figaro), but The Last Savage will have another go at civilization in January. The Metropolitan Opera will present its New York premiere in the grand manner that the composer intended—hopefully with a well-doctored libretto and score.