Posted 4:35 PM by Gene

Every three months (really, these days, every weekend) comes a new cultural sensation that blinds the hacks into thinking it's cured cancer. Back in 1958 it was something at the Met called Vanessa, an opera written by two lovers, Samuel Barber and Gian Carlo Menotti, that from the sounds of it was HERR DOKTOR SONDHEIM before its time -- i.e., lushly appointed gloom. The ad-blurbists raved, the wuhk won the P-Ulitzer...and it vanished from the earth. Peter G. Davis (good to have his byline back somewhere) blames all those ultra-learned piano bangers practicing what they called twelve-tone, but he gives a hint it might have been more than the dogma of the moment when he says "The Met brought the production back the next season, but few tickets were sold" -- and despite the opera phreaks' rep for reactionism they generally know a good tune when they hear one. Irony is it was designed by Cecil Beaton -- who did My Fair Lady, now a staple of the opera house (and which, for its enduring excellence, is not quite a snug fit there, given the notion of slumming, not to mention the industrial-strength voices doing a musical; but at least you can still hum the tunes leaving the hall). The intervening decades have seen many masterwuhks-- Willie Stark, Nixon in China -- extravagantly praised, only to die in the archives, or in the withered bosoms of those who must program filler among the inevitable Verdi and Puccini. No, the "small repertory of viable American operas" is Porgy and Bess -- and that is it.

P. S. on Willie Stark, which has evidently been staged only twice in 26 years:

The original production was dedicated to the American radio journalist Lowell Thomas.

...co-founder of the religious cult known as CapCities, who did more commercials than any other broadcast newsman until Paul HarVEH came along. How fitting.

P. P. S. on 11/8: Thomas did a prerecorded cameo in the original production, whose music Donal Henahan praised as "a remarkably thin score, in a style that could be heard as a parody of Britten and Menotti. Possibly in an effort to achieve dramatic clarity, he has written a kind of strident, prosaic recitative that tears at the listener's patience - and, no doubt, sears the vocal cords." Could a Paper of Re-CORD reviewer write such nowadays without PINCH calling the police?