Opera for Millions

Television opera is an expensive business; it costs some $25,000 to mount ann hour's worth and sponsors witht that kind of money seldom choose to spend it on opera. But NBC comforts itself with the thought that the next best thing to profits is prestige. Since 1949, NBC-TV has boosted its prestige with more than a dozen operas, mostly without benefit of sponsors. Last week No. 16 on the list went before the cameras: Czech Composer Bohuslav Martinu's The Marriage. Like Gian-Carlo Menotti's Amahl and the Night Visitors (TIME, Dec. 31, 1951), martinu's opera is short (55 minutes), written to be sung in English, and constructed with TV in mind every minute.

Based on a Gogol story, The Marriage is a comedy about a reluctant bachelor in the grip of a marriage broker. Martinu's score is lighthearted and craftsmanlike, though it contains no particularly memorable music. The production itself comes across as first-rate entertainment, thanks in good part to the collaboration of Composer Martinu and energetic, talented Peter Herman Adler, 53, director of NBC's television opera program.

It was Adler who first brought the idea of brief operatic works in English to NBC's music chief, Samuel Chotzinoff. Scholarly "Chotzy" liked the idea. One day Chotzy buttonholed RCA Board Chairman David Sarnoff: "General, I want you to hear some music." "The general was very annoyed," Adler recalls. "But anyway, I brought in some singers and they sang a scene from La Boheme, in English of course. In three minutes the general was in tears. He said, 'Could that be done on television?' " Chotzinoff andAdler assured him that it could, quickly blueprinted plans for an opera series.

The first year (1949) Adler directed a moderately successful version of the last act of La Boheme. The next year he put on four full operas. As NBC sharpened its camera and directing techniques, the series began pulling in millions of new viewers. Now in full swing, Adler's staff handles its job with professional ease. His biggest trouble: compressing standard stage works into an hour's running time.

He usually drops the overtures and gets right into the story. When the shortening treatment was given to Benjamin Britten's Billy Budd last fall, critics congratulated NBC on having made Britten's four-acter more coherent and compelling than before.

Best of all, from NBC's viewpoint is the growing number of network stations which choose to carry the opera series--26 for Martinu's Marriage last week. Adler and Chotzinoff are men with a mission these days. Says Chotzinoff: "Television is the only hope of opera in America."

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