The first New York performance of *Troilus and Cressida*, given at the City Center in the fall of 1955. Act I.

## Twelve Years of Opera at the City Center: an Appraisal

BY ROBERT LAWRENCE

NO ARTISTIC MOVEMENT, creative or representative, can hope to succeed unless the public is ready to receive it. The isolated vanguard, the banner defiantly unfurled, are in vain unless somewhere along the line, unexpected perhaps even by the leaders of the assault, shock troops are standing by, prepared to take up the struggle and carry it to a decisive finish. The creative artist's conquest of a large-scale audience is too formidable a problem to be considered here; but the musical manager has a field of action much easier to chart. Through basic acumen, the successful impresario knows in advance when the time is ripe to risk all on a daring artistic move, even when no hint of public support has been given.

Lazlo Halasz, in bringing opera to the New York City Center during the historic month of February, 1944, seems to have had this sense of timing. His ultimate contribution was

not so much the activating of a company as it was the creation of a public. For whatever reason, there was—twelve years ago—a large potential of New York music lovers not actively in touch with the productions at the Metropolitan Opera House or with concerts at Carnegie Hall. They stayed away mainly because the scale of prices was beyond their budget; but also, as things turned out, they wanted to hear new works unavailable in the larger houses. When the Halasz troupe was established, this public filled the Center for opera. It returned, just as enthusiastically, for the symphony programs given there (regretably, they were soon dropped) by Leonard Bernstein. Their wallets were lean; their average age was young; but their ardor was constant and their enthusiasm almost unprecedented in this town. Unprecedented because it responded less to performers than to music itself. There were no amateur claques on hand

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The "Serenade of the Harlequin" from the New York City Center production of the one-act opera, Ariadne auf Naxos.

to bolster the morale, prestige and overween-
ing pride of rival singers. These young people
were interested in the scores they were hear-
ing, works little known or not previously given.

The new company began with its best foot
forward. Mr. Halasz's performances stressed
minute attention to ensemble, both musical
and dramatic. Even so eminent an artist as
Dusolina Giannini, who appeared in the open-
ing Tosca, fitted into the mosaic of the cast
with no attempt to dominate. The excellently
rehearsed, carefully thought out production
made a deep impression on local opera goers.
In addition, the prices—less than half those
charged for comparable locations at the Met-
ropolitan—made it possible for a whole new
segment of the public to hear opera for the
first time. Slowly at first and then with ac-
celerated tempo, the company became a muni-
cipal success. Four years later it was on the
road as well, a national touring organization.

The early group of standard operas per-
formed by the Halasz troupe had become the
nucleus of a larger repertory. Appropriate
and far-seeing steps, taken by the City Cen-
ter's board of directors, bore fruit in the
formation of a fine permanent outfit. A mem-

orable group of young singers was assembled,
important and unusual works such as Ariadne
auf Naxos and Werther were mounted with
devotion; and thus the company served the
double purpose of developing gifted artists
and bringing unusual fare to an audience that
wanted it. Ariadne caught on with the public
at once and received several performances.
Werther, because policy at the Center seemed
more concerned with an immediate financial
yield than the building up of a new attraction
over a long term, was withdrawn after two or
three showings. Nevertheless, the production
of novelties went on. William Grant Still's
Troubled Island was given an interesting, if
not wholly successful, world premiere; there
was a vulgarized but high-octane presentation
of Prokofeff's The Love of Three Oranges;
Eugene Onegin, Don Giovanni and Wolf-
Ferrari's The Four Ruffians were further in-
teresting productions. At the same time, the
company began to exceed itself and offer
operas too ambitious for the Center's limited
stage and modest orchestral facilities: The
Flying Dutchman and Die Meistersinger,
Aida, Andrea Chenier, Turandot, Der Rosen-
kavalier. Simultaneously, indifferent and some-

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The fourth act of *Troubled Island* in its world premier at the New York City Center.

times inadequate performances of such stand-
ard works as Rigoletto, Madame Butterfly,
Tosca (no longer with singers of Miss Gian-
nini's eminence) and The Barber of Seville
started to lower the standards of the house.

Clearly an impasse was being reached,
generated by the pretensions of the musical
director and quickened by the attitude of a
few embattled members of the Center's gov-
erning board.

A clash had to come at the Center; and its
impact was heightened by further misunder-
standings between Mr. Halasz and his em-
ployees. An expert, and perhaps unparalleled,
organizer, he allowed a penchant for power
to obscure his talents as an executive. Dissen-
sion arose among the singers; a movement to
oust the impresario from his post was ulti-
mately successful; but the handling of this
matter was to bring controversy in its wake
for many succeeding years.

A dispassionate summation of the Halasz
regime, which lasted from 1944 through 1951,
will show the public of this city to be largely
in debt to the impresario. He set standards
of operatic performance which have never been
surpassed at the Center and only occasion-

Robert Weede and Helena Bliss in Troubled Island.

Laurel Hurley, Frances Bible and Edith Evans as they appeared in Cenerentola with the New York City Opera Company.

ally equalled—as in the case of the latter-day Cenerentola and Troilus and Cressida. Under his guidance, a superbly interesting repertory took shape. Notable singers, among them Dorothy Kirsten, Eugene Conley and James Pease, were graduated into the ranks of older and more famous companies; while another group of vocalists, stunningly competent, grew up within the Center and stayed there as its pillars. More memorable than any singer heard within this period was a conductor, Jean Morel, whose Pelléas et Mélisande is par orchestraly for this generation and whose Werther remains perhaps the happiest achievement of the City Center Opera to date. Joseph Rosenstock, another excellent conductor, was added to the staff by Mr. Halasz and proved his worth especially in the field of Mozart.

The chief musical drawback of Mr. Halasz's administration lay in his own conducting which — though adequate to certain of the more obscure German and Slavic operas—seemed insufficiently adroit for the general repertory. This handicap, however, was a minor item alongside the more fundamental insufficiency — esthetic rather than musical — on which the Halasz regime foundered and which has plagued the City Center Opera

ever since. The truth is here concerned, the necessity for taking stock and facing one's self in the mirror. Certain questions still applicable today were never answered during the Halasz ascendency: By virtue of popular prices and the existence of a large new public, is the City Center Opera to occupy in New York the position of a European Volksoper—a poor uptown cousin performing the same repertory as the Metropolitan, but less well? Or is it to follow, instead, the pattern of an Opéra Comique, offering at modest admission fees an intimate, rather specialized repertory bearing no point of contact with that of the larger, older house? These are questions which, toward the end of Mr. Halasz's rule, became pressing and have left their mark.

The problem was further bedeviled by a type of stage direction one used to see in German provincial theaters during the early 1930's: literal, "busy," invariably calling attention to its own oppressive ingenuity. All scenic and costume designs of the Center's earlier years fitted into this Teutonic mold, even the direction of Theodor Komisarjevsky —in charge of the stage for many of these performances—suggesting more strongly a Düsseldorf or Darmstadt orientation than his

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The Merry Wives of Windsor in its first production at the City Center, Spring 1955.

Moscow Art Theatre origin. At the very time when the company's repertory seemed nearest the ideals of Opéra Comique, the scales of performance were being tipped in favor of Volksoper style.

Clearly the artistic peaks of the Halasz era were the opening Tosca, Ariadne auf Naxos, Werther, Pelléas et Mélisande (despite the presence of Berlin expressionist sets grafted onto a French impressionist score) and Troubled Island. The majority of these works —always excepting Tosca—were intimate, unhackneyed operas given in an auditorium whose limited size assisted communication and congeniality. They pointed the way toward the establishment of a theater in the French tradition, such as Oscar Hammerstein had given New York a generation earlier; but, in the course of time, Central Europe triumphed and the City Center Opera, with its cut-down stagings of Aida and Turandot, its scrub-team performances of Rigoletto and Butterfly, emerged as a local Volksoper, with popular prices chiefly to commend it.

This personality at war with itself, the patient's left foot definitely planted in German provincial soil, was transferred to the account of Joseph Rosenstock when that most

The "Drinking Song" from The Merry Wives of Windsor

Troilus and Cressida With Phyllis Curtin as Cressida

capable conductor became artistic director of the City Center Opera. His list of successes has been a compelling one, headed by the scintillating *Cenerentola* and *The Merry Wives of Windsor*, while the New York premiere of Sir William Walton's *Troilus and Cressida* also earned considerable praise. A local *Wozzeck*, though honorably intended, was beyond the Center's resources. Other good deeds of the Rosenstock regime, artistically speaking, have been the presentation of Marc Blitzstein's *Regina*, the introduction to America of von Einem's *The Trial* and of Bartok's *Bluebeard's Castle*, and the first performance anywhere of Aaron Copland's opera *The Tender Land*. None of these works received a perfect press nor, in fact, deserved it; but the fact remains that they were new, different, unpetrified, and worth trying. Furthermore, they were well chosen for the intimate nature of the Center theater.

On the debit side were dismal performances of such familiar pieces as *Don Pasquale* and

*Falstaff* (which can tax the resources of even the most richly endowed opera house) as well as a remote revival of Tchaikovsky's *Golden Slippers*. The five works of Gian-Carlo Menotti racked up by both the Halasz and the Rosenstock regimes, leaving only *Amelia*, the minuscule *Telephone*, and *The Saint of Bleeker Street* unaccounted for, seems to this writer excessive in number from the standpoint of balanced and representative repertory.

Stage direction under Mr. Rosenstock continued to be Germanic. There were one or two brief reprieves from a prevailing sense of heaviness, notably in Jerome Robbins' expert and sympathetic handling of the Copland *Tender Land*; but by and large the same franc-tatic synchronization of movement on stage with the more obvious rhythms from the orchestra pit (Otto Erhardt's *Falstaff* must have set a near-choreographic record in this respect) dominated as before.

New administrative problems arose which, though distressing in themselves, helped put

the relationship of the opera company toward the City Center into clearer focus. While the operatic troupe was playing to dwindling audiences and mounting deficits, the other two performing wings of the Center—ballet and drama—were riding high in popular favor. Both had brought national prestige to the Center and, in the case of the New York City Ballet's European appearances, international fame. In an effort to iron out artistic and financial disparities between the opera and these other branches, the good offices of the Center's managing director, Lincoln Kirstein, might well have been put to use. Instead he was permitted to resign and Mr. Rosenstock was re-engaged as head of the opera.

A new and perhaps more drastic incident than that involving the dismissal of Laszlo Halasz, with press and public taking sides, was avoided subsequently through Mr. Rosenstock's decision to withdraw from all administrative duties after the spring season of 1956. He will concentrate on conducting and remain as a valued member of the Center's musical staff. Erich Leinsdorf has been engaged as

artistic director and therein lies good news; for Mr. Leinsdorf, despite his Viennese birth, is basically American in outlook and most of his career has been in this country. Those with knowledge of his skill and his integrity cannot but wish him well; and it is the writer's hope that Mr. Leinsdorf will come to grips, at the earliest opportunity, with the two fundamental questions which are bound to confront him: How may the City Center Opera best be integrated within the scope of the institution as a whole, providing a worthy complement to the dramatic and balletic wings? . . . And how will this company develop—as a Volksooper, Opéra Comique, or (preferably perhaps) a new type of native organization? The troupe, twelve years after its founding, stands at the crossroads. It is the fervent hope of everyone that its new director—a professional artist of wide sympathies—might reestablish the company on a plane compatible with the musical tastes of those New Yorkers whose appetites for the new and unusual, as well as the intimate old, have led them in the past toward the City Center Opera.

Troilus and Cressida Act III

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