More Helen

More Heler

When the wealthy Juilliard Musical Foundation gave the Metropolitan Opera Company $50,000 last year John Erskine, president of Juilliard's Music School, made public a list of strings to the gift. One was that the Metropolitan should pay more attention to native talent (TIME, March 13, 1933). President Erskine had taken to writing opera librettos but the Metropolitan had already scheduled the Hanson-Stokes Merry Mount for its single native venture this season. It fell to the Juilliard School last week to present Helen Retires, on which Mr. Erskine collaborated with Composer George Antheil.

Helen Retires is a leftover from the onetime best-selling Helen of Troy, which made Writer Erskine's fame. The opera starts with Menelaos' funeral banquet and Helen as tart a widow as ever she was in the novel. Though she has been loved. she has never known love's madness. So she sets out to find Achilles on the Island of the Blest. Act I ends with movies showing a diving submarine and in Act II Helen uses an elevator to complete her descent to the netherworld. There the warrior-ghosts have taken on ectoplasmic shapes. Against their warning Achilles emerges, in white knee skirts, white mittens and a skin-tight sweater with a letter A on his chest. With Helen he shoots up out of Hades on the elevator.

The Act III setting, supposed to be the Elysian Fields, looks like an old-fashioned cut-out valentine with harp strings on one side and a foot bridge across the middle. There Helen and Achilles sit and sing love duets. An old fisherman comes by. convinces Helen that no love can last forever. She sends Achilles back to the other ghosts, stretches herself out to die. A younger fisherman appears. After he dances vigorously for her, the incurable Helen decides to try again.

George Antheil branded himself seven years ago as the most freakish of U. S. composers. He grew up in Trenton, N. J., went to Paris to live when he was 20. After six years he celebrated his homecoming by putting on in Manhattan his Ballet Mecanique with ten pianos, wind machines, an airplane propeller, assorted horns, whistles and bells. The critics' jeers drove him back to Paris. Lately he claimed that he had reformed. Helen Retires was to illustrate his conversion to melody. But basically most of its music seemed just as empty as his percussive ballet. The student singers did their parts creditably enough but most of the Erskine lines were lost in fuzzy orchestration. Helen's 20th Century ways were described by hippety-hoppety jazz. The love waltz might have served for a routine in a banal musical show.

After the performance Conductor Albert Stoessel gave the collaborators medals from the American Opera Society of Chicago. Engraved on each was a message wishing "the continued success of such a fine work for the great cause of American musical art."

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