Premi

The premiere of a new opera took place last week in the cotton-mill and college town of Spartanburg, S.C. That fact was not surprising. Since 1939 Spartanburg has been staging spring music festivals with a fine exploring, self-sufficient spirit. It has no rich backers, no imported stars; it keeps to its promise of "no performances of hackneyed works." Instead it has put on with local talent such rarities as Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, Mozart's Requiem. So last week, again festival time in Spartanburg, saw the production of Ernst Bacon's A Tree on the Plains.

The stage set was a homely scene: a shabby pine-board house, the decrepit tonneau of a model T. The hero was a cow hand; the heroine, a girl who dreamed of beauty parlors and city lights; the villain, her brother--a jazzing, hitchhiking kid home from the "Aggies." The music had no arias, but many a songful moment, underlined the action as plain people led simple lives, touched with bucolic dignity and rural nobility. Listed as a "music-play," A Tree on the Plains could well have been called folk opera.

Members of the cast included the choirmaster of the First Baptist Church, two Converse College students, a voice teacher, a movie usher, a private at nearby Camp Croft. Local, too, was the composer, for dark, rugged Ernst Bacon, 43, is dean of the music school at Spartanburg's Converse College, and the guiding spirit of the festivals. A Chicago-born musician who has won a Pulitzer music award and two Guggenheim fellowships, Bacon has composed sensitive songs, witty orchestral works, tuneful light music. Last year the League of Composers commissioned him to compose the second* opera under its Composers' Theater plan for opera suitable for colleges and little theaters, i.e., easily cast and staged. Commission for the libretto went to his close friend Paul Horgan, poet, novelist, artist, author of the Harper prize novel, The Fault of Angels, other fiction about the Southwest. The resulting A Tree on the Plains is a musically modest opera, occasionally rising to heights of beauty, mainly important as a signpost that opera is turning from an exotic plant into a wayside flower, part of the American scene.

* The first: Randall Thompson's Solomon and Balk is (TIME, April 6).

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