Word: wozzeck
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When the New York City Opera Company stops trying to compete with the Metropolitan and sticks to lighthearted masterpieces or frank innovations-Mozart's Marriage of Figaro, Rossini's Cinderella, Prokofiev's The Love for Three Oranges, Berg's Wozzeck-it is hard to beat. But it has had trouble keeping its conductor-managers. The man who runs the City Opera, like any opera manager, must be diplomatic, versatile and tough; he must convince the public that his programs are worthwhile, his singers that they are getting parts worthy of their talents, his board of directors...
Recently, her interest has been turning toward opera. She scored a hit in Berg's Wozzeck, when Dimitri Mitropoulos gave a concert version with the New York Philharmonic-Symphony (TIME, April 23, 1951). A year ago, when M-G-M made Unfinished Melody, about the life of onetime Metropolitan Opera Soprano Marjorie Lawrence, Soprano Farrell went to Hollywood to dub in her voice (the part was played by Cinemactress Eleanor Parker). Singer Farrell displayed all the instincts of a born vaudevillian. Says she: "When Lawrence drops to the stage with polio while singing the Liebestod, I sang with frogs...
...write a novel (3 for Bedroom C), start a play and marry famed Dancer Vera Zorina. Lately, he spends less and less time in the glass-fronted control booth supervising recording sessions, more and more behind his desk thinking up new ideas. Although he recorded Berg's operas Wozzeck and Lulu, and all the quartets of Schoenberg and Bartok, Lieberson discovered gradually that "it is becoming almost bourgeois to do contemporary music-everybody's doing it now." It is also too expensive for a major company to take a chance on unknown modern composers. At the same time...
...nightmare school blew in on the same wind that unroofed the old Habsburg Empire: Kafka grew up in Habsburg Prague; Alban Berg, who wrote the gloomy Wozzeck, was a Viennese; Bela Bartok, whose Bluebeard's Castle almost makes a sympathetic character out of Bluebeard, was a Hungarian; even Luigi Dallapiccola, whose opera, The Prisoner (TIME, May 29, 1950), gives him front rank in the new school, grew up in Austrian Istria...
...tried by a mysterious court for an unspecified crime, chivied by a cold, incomprehensible bureaucracy until he is finally led away by two black-clad agents and stabbed to death. This macabre theme of man tortured by forces he does not understand was successfully used by Alban Berg in Wozzeck and by Gian-Carlo Menotti in his more popular Consul. Salzburg first-nighters, remembering Von Einem's earlier, impressive opera, Danton's Death (TIME, Aug. 18, 1947), came with high hopes. But by the final curtain, they found themselves less than spellbound, responded with lukewarm applause...