Musical Forms and Genres
United States.
American contributions to international opera, after
a 19th-century desert of imitation German and French operas,
became much more numerous after World War II. It is possible
here to mention only one composer and a few isolated operas
that have evoked enduring resonance. The most often performed
of contemporary operatic composers has been the Italo-American
Gian Carlo Menotti. Using his own librettos, he has produced,
in a variety of structural styles, a series of Puccini-derived
melodramas and sentimental tragedies of considerable popular
appeal, among them The
Medium (1946), The
Consul (1950),
Amahl and the Night
Visitors (composed for television performance, 1951), and
The Saint of Bleecker Street (1954). He also wrote the
libretto for the first, mildly successful, opera of Samuel
Barber,
Vanessa (1958;
awarded 1958 Pulitzer Prize). Barber's second large opera, Antony
and Cleopatra (1966; libretto derived from Shakespeare by
Franco Zeffirelli), commissioned to inaugurate the second Metropolitan
Opera House in New York, was a failure and vanished quickly
from performance.
A unique niche is occupied by the two operas that Virgil Thomson
composed to texts by Gertrude
Stein arranged by Maurice
Grosser: the Spanish-tinted
Four Saints in Three
Acts (1934) and The
Mother of Us All (1947),
a delicious flow of invention around the figure of Susan B.
Anthony. Their fragile but real durability has resulted from
Thomson's singable, apt folk-based setting of texts that alternate
among the apparently nonsensical, the satiric, and the emotionally
moving. Perhaps the most important national opera consistently
in repertory is George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess (1935;
libretto by DuBose Heyward and Ira Gershwin), a blending of
folk opera and American musical comedy, which has had no recognizable
descendant of high quality. Within the United States--not to
count the "workshop operas" and simplified semi-folk near-operas
that many American composers recently have favoured--two of
the most frequently performed recent American operas are the
folklike "Western"
Ballad of Baby Doe
(libretto by John Latouche, 1956), by Douglas
Moore (1893-1969) and
the melodramatic, "Southern" Susannah (libretto by the
composer, 1955) by Carlisle Floyd.
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