Nightmare at the Opera

The reassuring thing about most grand opera is that nobody is ever left long in doubt as to who the villain is--or what he is after. A modern school of opera composition prefers another proposition: nobody is sure of anything. The plots of this school usually have the random malevolence of nightmares; the singing line often gets lost among the soliloquies. Such an opera made its U.S. debut last week in Manhattan's City Center: The Trial, by Viennese Composer Gottfried von Einem, based on Franz Kafka's famed nightmare of the same name.*

The Trial had already had its world premiere at Salzburg (TIME, Aug. 31), and its plot was familiar to a good many in City Center's advance-guard audience. A bank manager (known only as Joseph K.) is unaccountably arrested one morning; from then on he whirls ineffectually from one cold hope to another, never knowing what he is accused of or who his accusers are, until, at the end. he is marched off and stabbed to death by men he doesn't know.

In City Opera's moody production, each scene was hemmed in by high, grey walls broken only by gaping black windows. The action took place on a succession of movable scaffoldings, arranged to suggest a shabby room, an artist's studio, an office.

Von Einem's score, for all its effective orchestration, had more barking sound effects than flowing music; much of Joseph K.'s music was recitation on a single note. While The Trial went on, the audience sat intent and silent. But at the end the applause was thin. Most of it went to Tenor John Druary for his two hours of almost continuous singing in the difficult lead, and to Phyllis Curtin for her beautiful soprano and her coquetry in the parts of the opera's three erotic women.

'THE TRIAL' PROVES JUST THAT, headlined the no-nonsense Daily News. Wrote Olin Downes of the Times: "A praiseworthy performance of an opera that . . . did not deserve it."

* The 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.

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