Music: New Opera at Salzburg

Along with its brilliant revivals of Mozart and Richard Strauss, the Salzburg Festival likes to present new operas by contemporary composers. But again and again, the living composers sound less alive than the dead. This year’s opera: Penelope, by Switzerland’s promising Rolf Liebermann, 43, music director of Radio Zurich. Last week the work opened in a brilliant production, made a less than brilliant impression on audience and critics.

Composer Liebermann got his idea from a news clipping he read two years ago. Blending it with Homer’s Odyssey, Librettist Heinrich Strobel wove a modern story about a war widow (Penelope) who remarries, then hears that her husband (Ulysses) is still alive and about to return. When she goes to meet him at the station, she finds he has died on the way; and when she goes back home to her second husband, she finds that he has committed suicide in the meantime to save her from an impossible dilemma.

Liebermann’s music was ably written in a palatably underplayed twelve-tone technique, and contained such novelties as a jitterbug scene with boogie-woogie background. Nevertheless, first-nighters felt it was low on drama and without a decisive style of its own. Despite the efforts of Conductor George Szell and the cast, the audience clapped coolly. Success of the evening: Star Christl Goltz, who sang Penelope with the cold but brilliant voice that has made her one of the finest dramatic sopranos on the Continent. Her own feeling about Penelope differed from the majority: “We can be thankful that a modern work is as strong as this. The world goes on. We can’t always be singing Salome, Aïda and Rigoletto.”