Music: Opera Without Opulence

Something of an operatic figure him self, New York’s late Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia wanted to start a people’s opera. Four years ago he did — the non-profit New York City Opera Company —and hired an unsung director named Laszlo Halasz to run it: he was the only applicant who had no pull. But he id have push — enough push to start a small operatic revolution.

Hungarian-born Conductor Halasz, a slight and dynamic man who has been in the U.S. eleven years, was given a contract to produce three operas. He inherited a rococo hall, a shoe-string budget (seats are $2.40 top, one-third the Met’s) and a free hand. Says he: “Where there is no money, there is no interference from pocketbooks. The only thing that can save us is ideas.” At his first performance (Tosca), the guns of the firing squad failed to fire in the last act, and the hero had to drop dead without a bang. In Carmen, the audience was convulsed by a soldier trying to put his saber into its scabbard the wrong way. But by the time the curtain had gone down on Martha, critics cheered.

Halasz’ company lacked the Metropolitan Opera’s roster of big names and its opulence; but it was also free of the Met’s frequent stodginess. The actors did not move like automatons; the story was played, instead of merely being staged as pageantry. By careful auditioning, Halasz picked singers who looked, as well as sang, the part. Says he: “Generally speaking, you know, Tristan was not 50 years old, nor did Isolde weigh 250 pounds.” The production, unhampered by clumsy stage machinery, had pace. Halasz had picked up some ideas from Broadway and Hollywood, including pretty girls in the chorus and the use of screen projections for scenery. The Met has snapped up ten of his singers, including Dorothy Kirsten, Regina Resnik, Polyna Stoska. His performances of off-beat operas like Ariadne auf Naxos, and Eugen Onegin play to near-capacity audiences.

Last week, Conductor Halasz, a slightly grey 42, faced his toughest test: Mozart’s masterpiece, Don Giovanni. He had once helped Bruno Walter produce it in Salzburg, and had put it on himself in St. Louis. “Always before it is considered first of all music, second music, third music,” he said. “Now, first of all, we try to make it a play.”

What a standing-room-only audience saw one night last week was a fast-moving, well-sung, dramatic (if occasionally overplayed) Don Giovanni in two acts. With a stylized set, which was made to do for both indoor & outdoor scenes, Halasz simplified Don Giovanni’s nine cumbersome scenes without sacrificing any of the music. Wrote the New York Herald Tribune’s Critic Virgil Thomson: “The most distinguished piece of work all through that our city troupe has yet produced.”