Not Good, Not Bad

Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera last week put on its first world premiere in five seasons,/- and it was a queer one.

Called The Island God, it told a fantastic, metaphysical story, a conflict between an ancient Greek god and a modern castaway on a Mediterranean isle. In the final scene, the castaway discovers the grotesque truth: the god fears him, knowing that the man's faith in him is all that keeps the god alive. Defiantly the man shatters the god's sacred altar, forcing the god to destroy him and, in so doing, to destroy himself. The opera had so little drama in it, such paucity of stage movement, that New York Herald Tribune Critic Virgil Thomson labeled it "a secular cantata." The music seesawed in a narrow range between lyrical sweetness and sonorous majesty, soaring but once to fervent heights. Yet the opera could not be dismissed as a flop: it was fashioned with expertness, flavored with individuality, imbued with an inner spark.

Author & composer was 30-year-old Gian-Carlo Menotti. a Philadelphia-trained Italian whose name has loomed large in opera circles since his effervescent Amelia Goes to the Ball clicked happily in 1937. Menotti turned out a second hit in 1939: a radio opera. The Old Maid and the Thief, commissioned by NBC. His newest venture, like its predecessors, is short. Unlike them, it is a tragedy. Menotti had complained: "The critics wrote that my talent was only for opera buffa."

/- Since Walter Damrosch's The Man Without a Country, May 1937.

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