Opera in Mississippi

He is the grandson of a slave and the composer of seven operas, eight symphonies and close to a hundred other works. At 79, with his name in all the right reference books, William Grant Still could justifiably lay claim to the title "dean of American black composers." Except that he does not choose to. It is not that Still rejects his Negro heritage but that he feels his music has as many roots in Europe as it does in Africa. "If I have an ambition," he says, "it is to be recognized as a composer. Just that."

Still may get his wish some day. Right now he is going to have to settle for the benefits accruing to him as part of a revival of interest in serious black American music--as opposed to jazz and the blues. Within the past year the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra has devoted a week-long festival to Still and other black composers. Columbia Records has issued the first four albums of an ambitious new black-composers series. One of the LPs offers Still's Afro-American Symphony (1930), a prismatically scored, blues-flavored gem and, incidentally, the first symphony ever written by a black American. Last week in Jackson, Miss., the only professional black opera company in the U.S., a 3 1/2-year-old group called Opera/South, presented the world premiere of Still's 33-year-old opera A Bayou Legend.

That this opera could have been neglected for so many years testifies to the cruel, often mindless vagaries of musical fashion in the U.S. throughout the past generation or two. Legend is not a great work. It does not introduce any innovations in musical or dramatic style. It could in fact as easily have been written in 1910 as 1941. It has the directness (though not the genius) of Verdi, the misty orchestral hues of Delius and a soulful melodic style that both Puccini and Sigmund Romberg might have liked. Given the longstanding American addiction to the new and different, how could any U.S. opera company take such a throwback seriously?

Today, however, being up to date does not seem quite as important as it once did. The reason lies partly in the same craving for nostalgia that in the pop world has brought back Scott Joplin and 1950s' rock 'n' roll. Mostly it seems to stem from a foundering of the musical avant-garde and a desire on the part of performers and audiences alike to reassess what was going on while the twelve-tone and electronic boys were holding sway in the academies.

In the case of Still, A Bayou Legend reveals him as a kind of American Grieg --a miniaturist gifted with melody, an unerring sense of color and a fondness for the folklore. Although the performers in Jackson were all black, Legend is not especially a black opera, as the composer and his librettist wife Verna Arvey are the first to point out.

The story is set in the bayous near Biloxi, not too far from Still's birthplace in Woodville, Miss. The young Cajun Bazile falls in love with the spectral Aurore, defying the Cajun stricture against consorting with spirits as evil and punishable by death. The amorous Clothilde, jealous of a love she cannot understand, betrays her beloved to the village priest. Bazile is hanged. At the moment of his death, Bazile's spirit is joined with that of Aurore.

The performance was led adroitly by the veteran conductor Leonard de Paur, who first gained fame in the 1940s as leader of the De Paur Infantry Chorus. The women--Dramatic Soprano Juanita Waller (Aurore) of Pittsburgh, Pa., and Mezzo Barbara Conrad (Clothilde) of Pittsburg, Texas--provided most of the vocal excitement. Waller has a pearl-luscious voice, and her time along the European operatic trail (Bremen, Duesseldorf, Naples) has obviously been well spent. Conrad, that rare operatic find, a truly sexy mezzo, scored her biggest success to date last spring singing Carmen at the Houston Spring Opera Festival.

Haunted Grotto. The evening was an emphatic justification of the aims of the Jackson company. Until the founding of Opera/South, there was little opportunity in Mississippi for blacks to sing opera. The backing of three Jackson-area black colleges--Jackson State, Tougaloo and Utica Junior--has made a musical theater workable. Students sing in the chorus, build sets and fashion costumes. Bayou Legend's simple but effective one-piece set--a double-trunked oak tree that for the Act II duet between Bazile and Aurore turns magically into a haunted grotto--required only $2,000 of the company's annual $102,000 budget, a moneysaving feat that could not have been duplicated in union shops.

What next for Opera/South? Following its interest in the classics (Aida, Turandot and Otello have already been produced), the company will stage The Flying Dutchman in the spring. Looking ahead to the 1976 Bicentennial, the company has commissioned a new opera from Black Composer Ulysses Kay. It will be based on the Civil War novel Jubilee, by Mississippi's Margaret Walker. With all that in the works, General Manager Dolores Ardoyno has only one other wish: "I really would love it if other opera companies would have the initiative at least to take a look at Billy Still's Bayou Legend."

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