Music: New Opera in Manhattan

When England’s famed Composer William Walton sat down five years ago to write his first opera, he determined to make it a “singers’ opera.” By that he meant that he would write as melodiously as possible, use his ex-choirboy’s knowledge of the voice to make things easy for the singers (“They’ve had a rather poor time of it for the last 30 years”). He also decided to swallow any fears he might have about sounding like Verdi or Puccini. Last week, ten months after the London première, the New York City Opera staged its version of Troilus and Cressida. It was a direct hit.

Troilus’ firm foundation is British Poet Christopher Hassall’s libretto, which keeps things happening from curtain-up. The plot presents the human side of the besieged Trojans and particularly the widow Cressida (sung by Phyllis Curtin), who succumbs to Troilus (Jon Grain), partly through the conniving of Pandarus (Norman Kelley), only to be captured by the Greeks. By the time she puts herself to the sword, she is at least as credible as Tosca, as touching as Mimi.

Composer Walton built his score “word by word, bar by bar,” and the structure came out sound as the Trojan Horse. The orchestra makes a luxurious sound, with plenty of pleasing details such as the soft zips on the xylophone that punctuate an Act II party scene. The vocal melody sometimes soars, e.g., the parting duet (“O gentle heart, would we again were drifting/ Far from this world of waking”), but is often pale and fragile as the illustrations in English children’s books. Walton, after all, is neither Italian nor Russian, and no one need complain if he goes politely Anglo-Saxon in the clutches. His one baldly passionate scene is the orchestral storm that accompanies the lovers to bed behind their curtain; its three thundering climaxes are almost embarrassingly literal (“You have to pass the night somehow,” quips Walton).

Walton is convinced that operas are good for composers. “I don’t know why it is,” he says, “but you can write the greatest symphony in the world and remain quite unknown. If you write an opera, your name’s all over the place.”