Joan in Bronxville

Any composer who can lure Manhattan critics into taking a 30-minute train ride to the suburbs to hear a piece of music must have something on the ball. Blade-thin, Manhattan-born Norman Dello Joio apparently is one composer who has. When New York's progressive Sarah Lawrence College put on his first opera last week, Manhattan critics and admirers traveled right out to Bronxville to hear it.

The visitors were not taking 37-year-old Composer Dello Joio entirely on faith. The lucid, lyrical music of his 30-odd choral works, chamber pieces and ballet scores has already won him two Guggenheim fellowships and the New York Music Critics Circle Award for 1948-49. He had hit on the idea for his opera after seeing the movie Joan of Arc, thought he could supply what the movie had largely left out: Joan's "inner life."

The Triumph of Joan got more than many an opera could hope for in the way of production. It was intimately and imaginatively staged, with the audience sitting around three sides of the performers. Its heroine, Gisela Fischer, a 21-year-old Sarah Lawrence junior, could act as well as sing. Yet Triumph of Joan came off closer to oratorio than opera.

Joan's "inner life" offered more opportunity for soliloquy in her cell than for dramatic movement. The limply worded libretto, by Queens College Music Professor Joseph Machlis, was not only static but too often banal. And the music, well-made but often weak where it needed strength, was more effective at setting moods than delivering powerful operatic punches.

Those faults were serious enough to keep any opera from scoring a resounding success. Most first-nighters agreed that Joan rated as a good first try.

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