Music: Opera's Summer Rites

Opera, says Mr. Scruples in Mozart's The Impresario, "occasionally loses skirmishes, but it invariably wins the battle for survival." On the theory that some of the most interesting battles are taking place in that realm known as regional opera, TIME'S music critic William Bender visited St. Paul, Katonah, N. Y., and Ottawa. He encountered imaginative programming, talented young singers, skilled managerial talent and audiences as eager for the untried as the familiar. His report:

ST. PAUL OPERA is an adventurous, four-year-old summer festival with an extensive following not only in Minnesota but also in bordering Wisconsin and Iowa. It has given the world premiere of Lee Hoiby's Summer and Smoke, the American premiere of Carl Nielsen's Maskarade, and staged such other esoterica as Delius' A Village Romeo and Juliet and Carlisle Floyd's Of Mice and Men.

The current St. Paul season ranges from a Carmen in French to a Siegfried in English. Last week the company offered the American premiere of Engagement in San Domingo by Germany's Werner Egk, 73, whose music tends to be grandiose and wildly varied. Engagement is a kind of Caribbean Aida set in what is now Haiti during the black natives' overthrow of the French colonists at the turn of the 19th century. The heroine is the mulatto Jeanne, who falls in love with the French officer Christoph, though her revolutionist mother Bobokan is plotting his death. At the end, Jeanne is killed by Christoph, who mistakes her attempt to help him for treachery.

The story is a natural for opera, set by the composer in a style that can only be called Egk-clectic. The blues, dashes of Strauss and Puccini, an occasional roll of voodoo drums—all these are woven into a skillful pastiche. If hardly innovative, it is easy to listen to and, at key moments, appropriately bravura. Never mind such questions as why Egk chose the blues to evoke a Caribbean mood, instead of a music more indigenous to the West Indies. Music Director Igor Buketoff led a crisp, idiomatic performance that drew the most from Egk's acrobatic orchestral score and made the blues passages seem natural, less like interludes. As Jeanne, Newcomer Barbara Hendricks from Little Rock, Ark., displayed a ravishing lyric soprano voice. Karl Brock not only handled the rigorous tenor lead role of Christoph with a convincing mixture of despair and bravado but also produced a splendid English translation of Egk's German libretto.

In addition to the fine performances, one of St. Paul Opera's biggest contributions to regional opera is the launching of a program to share production costs (sets and costumes) with four other companies—the Seattle, San Diego, Houston and Washington, D.C. Each season, the Gramma Fisher Foundation * in Marshalltown, Iowa, contributes $100,000 for a new operatic production that is mounted by one of the companies, then made available in succeeding years to the others. St. Paul, for example, currently has a very stylish Manon that was introduced earlier this year in Houston. The plan is a sensible, sane method of cutting the staggering costs of opera today, and it is fortunately catching on elsewhere.