Opera on the Ranch

The traffic on the big, four-lane Santa Fe-Taos highway was fin to fender one evening last week. Five miles outside Santa Fe the line of cars turned off the highway, crept to the top of one of the low-lying foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and disgorged a crowd of dinner-jacketed men and bare-shouldered women. In the open theater on the far side of the hill, the lights were about to go up on the Southwest's first full season of resident, repertory-company opera.

For the curtain raiser, the brand-new Santa Fe Opera Association had selected a surefire heart-throbber--Puccini's Madame Butterfly. The 32-piece orchestra launched into the opening bars as the distant view of the Jemez range faded in the dusk. Tenor William McGrath and Soprano Maria Ferriero soared expertly through Lieut. Pinkerton's and Cio-Cio-San's famous love scene climaxed by her Twilight Has Fallen, and Butterfly's lingering, final-curtain suicide touched off a round of applause that lasted through ten curtain calls. Technically, there were a few first-night bobbles. Gusts off the hills threatened to sweep away the Japanese screens, but Stage Director Bill Butler was jubilant. Said he: "At least we've taken the curse off the new paint."

Self-Contained. The Santa Fe Opera is the inspiration of wealthy young (31) Conductor John Crosby, who last year gave up his job as assistant director of Columbia University's Opera Workshop and settled in New Mexico. Arguing that there was no reason why "Americans should have to travel to Europe in the summer to get good music," he talked friends into putting up $150,000, and selected the "rainless, mosquitoless and airplaneless" 76-acre San Juan ranch in the pinon-studded hills north of the city as the location for an amphitheater. Crosby and associates constructed a stage shell with an up-sloping flying roof and forward-sweeping wings designed to kill the echo off the rocky hills. To reflect the sound, engineers sank a pool between the orchestra pit and the 480-seat amphitheater, making one of the handsomest operatic settings in the Western Hemisphere.

General Director Crosby is certain that audiences in the Southwest can take their opera straight, during its two-month season will give English-language productions of Mozart's Cosi Fan Tutte, Strauss's Ariadne on Naxos, Rossini's Barber of Seville, Pergolesi's La Serva Padrona, plus Stravinsky's Rake's Progress (conducted by Stravinsky Protege Robert Craft) and the premiere of The Tower, a one-act opera by young (24) U.S. Composer Marvin Levy. Crosby is also proud that his Santa Fe group, recruited from such companies as the NBC Opera and the Lyric Opera of Chicago, is "completely self-contained," i.e., it can operate independently of guest artists.

A Good Thing. Santa Fe has shelled out for opera as though it were investing in big-league baseball. The opening week was a sellout, and Crosby is counting on 90% attendance for the rest of the season (which will leave the company with an easily manageable $5,000-to-$10,000 deficit). Direct contributions have poured in from service-station owners, haberdashers, statehouse employees and wealthy, retired businessmen. If some are not all-out lovers of opera, all have been touched on their civic pride, or calculate the potential profits to be had if Santa Fe becomes the Salzburg of the Southwest. "I don't know a damn thing about opera," said the Opera Association's president; Walter R. Barker, a former Chicago industrialist, "but I know a good thing when I see it."

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