The Press: Ibbetson Revisited

The most successful American opera ever staged at the Metropolitan was Deems Taylor’s Peter Ibbetson. At its premiere in 1931, it won 36 curtain calls, ran for four seasons. After that, Ibbetson disappeared from the Met’s repertory, for no very clear reason. Says Composer Taylor: “After all, I can’t go ring Mr. Bing’s bell and say, ‘Where’s my opera?’ ” Last week, after a quarter-century, his opera was back—not at the Met but at New York’s enterprising Empire State Festival.

Ibbetson, based on the mistily romantic 19th century novel by George du Maurier, has to do with a young architect who meets the girl he once loved as a child in Paris, learns that she is married but continues to carry on a sort of astral affair with her in his dreams. The opera, like the book, juxtaposes scenes of fact and fantasy in a pre-Freudian demonstration of the relation between the inner and outer life. At Ibbetson’s premiere, the hero’s curiously frustrated longings were enough to reduce the audience to tears, but at last week’s revival they often seemed fussily oldfashioned; Du Maurier’s heroine is such a thoroughgoing Victorian that she hesitates to appear in her lover’s dreams until she gets a legal separation from her husband.

As sung by Licia Albanese and Charles K. L. Davis, Composer Taylor’s score, shot through with Debussyan and Wagnerian echoes, still sounded deft, elegant, and admirably welded to the libretto’s moods. Except in its ingenious weaving of French folk songs into the dream sequences, the score rarely pretends to be anything other than expert incidental music. But that is enough for Composer-Critic Taylor, who began his career as a piano-roll puncher, vaudeville entertainer and poster artist, is not embarrassed to recall that he narrated Walt Disney’s Fantasia, and thinks that U.S. music needs more corn to replace the “dry, squeezed lemon” of modernism. At 74 turning again to composition, Taylor says of Ibbetson: “I’d forgotten how good it is.”