New York American, April 13, 1930.

In the Music World

Modernistic Opera Offered With Pagan Ballet, Led by Stokowski at Metropolitan

By Leonard Liebling

An unusual and in several respects remarkable evening was experienced yesterday at the

Metropolitan Opera House.

Its regular company is on tour and the edifice was given over to a production sponsored by

The League of Composers and put on by Leopold Stokowski, the Philadelphia Orchestra, a

solo baritone, a mixed vocal chorus, a troupe of dancers and pantomimists, and a staff of

choreographic directors, lightning experts, stage-managers, and scenic costume designers.

Two works made up the programme, Arnold Schoenberg's "Die Glueckliche Hand" "The

Hand of Fate) a "drama with music"; and Igor Stravinsky's "Le Sacre du Printemps" (Rite of

the Spring), a ballet of pagan Russia.

The Schoenberg work hat its initial American production on this occasion; and similarly the

Stravinsky piece enjoyed its first presentation in this country as a ballet, the form in which he

originally premiered his opus at Paris, in 1913, with the Ballet Russe. Stravinsky later made

his score into a danceless concert version, which has been played here frequently by the

symphony orchestras. Schoenberg's "Die Glueckliche Hand", finished also in 1913, did not

see the stage until 1924, at Vienna.

Only One Solo Singer

Both works, therefore, are seventeen years old and do not represent the most recent tendencies

of their composers. Stravinsky is now retracing his steps, "back to Bach"; Schoenberg

declares he is "going forward" with what he terms a twelve-tone scale which enables him to

write "geometrical" and "mathematical" music. (It may be remembered that some of

Schoenbergs's recent output was roundly hissed at Carnegie Hall not many months ago.)

Stokowski, a faithful exponent of modernistic music - he says that we must hear it even if we

do not like it - explains the Schoenberg music drama as a parallel synthesis of three scores:

orchestral and vocal, pantomime and dramatic action, sequence of color-light.

There is only one solo singer in "Die Glueckliche Hand," and he is known as The Man. The

rest of the characters mime their parts. The chorus sits in the orchestra pit and comments

partly vocally, partly spoken.

There is only one scene, consisting of an impressionistically serve back-set suggesting a

building blanked by double stairways. At the rise of the curtain we see The Man, on his hands

and knees, and over him hovers The Chimera, a winged male figure which looks half-bat, half

-spider. This spectre belabors The Man and holds him in bondage the while he longs for

earthly happiness, "although heavenly joy is his destiny."

The Woman dances on, and after a fleeting amatory episode, elopes with a richly attired

stranger, who seems to represent the power of money. Two workmen mould a mass of gold

on an anvil. The Man seizes a sword, breaks the anvil in two -a la Siegfried- and the gold

turns into a gem-studded crown.

The Woman returns momentarily but flees again, and The Man, after a short realization of the

triumph of spirit and the control of destiny, desires The Woman anew and promptly fals back

into the power of the hideous clawing, clutching Chimera, while the chorus reproaches the

victim of fate. The entire piece takes only about fifteen minutes to perform.

Economy in Music

Symbolically, the libretto does not seem difficult to follow, if Schoenberg, who wrote it,

designs to argue that things of the spirit are superior to those of the flesh. He has, however,

treated his brief scenario very skeptically and without originality or power to convince. The

music, though scored for large orchestra, aims at economy in the matters of noise and of

descriptiveness. "Sometimes," we are told, "a single measure is sufficient to represent an

incident, and already in the next measure something else is a-foot."

To the present reviewer not much seemed to be a-foot at any time except the now familiar

devices of the modernist who tries to divorce music from melody and every other simple

appeal.

There were some delicate effects of orchestration and a few of orchestration and a few

striking bits of characterization. On the whole it seems as though Schoenberg followed the

custom of painters and executed a skeleton sketch to serve as a working-model for later larger

productions.

If that was his intention, "Die Glueckliche Hand" appears to have remained in the

experimental stage, but several other composers took the hint and worked along the line of

Schoenberg's suggestion. Not with much success, however.

Character Well Acted

In this aberrated, minature "music drama," Ivan Ivantzoff portrayed The Man graphically and

sang with power and expressiveness. Doris Humphrey, plastic and graceful, was the fickle

seductress. Olin Howard did the gruesome Chimera. The chorus consisted of seventeen voices

from the Curtis Institute of Music (Philadelphia). Rouben Mamoulian directed the stage

production. The settings and constumes were designed by Robert Edmond Jones, who has

done a better job on other occasions.

It is not necessary at this time to point out to faithful reades of this department of the New

Work American what the music of Stravisky's "Le Sacre du Printemps" is like, or to repeat

praise of its rude eloquence and elemental power.

But it should be said that those qualities were heightened greatly by the framework which

surrounded the Stravinsky score last evening. In fact, many of the passages in the score took

on new meaning through visual exposition of the action for which they were composed.

Leonide Masside directed the choreography and achieved a remarkable demonstration if his

richly imaginative art. Overwhelmingly effective and suggestively pagan were the abrupt,

sturdy movements of the scantily-clad men and maidens; their rude evolutions and

revolutions; their tremendous, earth-shaking jumpings and stampings; and the sinister ecstasy

of their games and orgies preceding the selection and slaying of the virgin sacrificed in

adoration of the fertility of Spring.

Audience Impressed

The work as a whole made an evident deep impression and was rewarded with prolonged,

enthusiastic applause, in strong contrast to the puzzled politeness which the audience

exhibited toward "Die Glueckliche Hand."

Martha Graham enacted and danced the role of the chosen Virgin, and with endless variety of

poses and steps and most intelligent play of features, suggested the primitive grace, orgiastic

abandonment and grotesque terror of the sacrificial maiden. Gould Stevens was the Sage and

Anita Avila the Witch.

Stokowski made it plain that he considers all this extremist music important, and he threw

himself heart and soul into the doings of last evening, giving convincing evidence of his

thorough knowledge, not only of both scores, but also of the proceedings on the stage. He

synchronized the complicated Stravinsky pages perfectly with the details of this performance.

The orchestra accomplished its difficult role superbly.

In "Die Glueckliche Hand" the color-effects asked for in the composer's score - blue, violet,

red, "dirty gray," etc.- were not forthcoming. It is Stokowski's belief that no American theatre

is equipped to carry out Schoenberg's coloristic dircetions.

The performance was for the benefit of the National Music League and Composers' Fund. It

will be repeated tonight as the last "concert" of the regular Philadelphia Orchestra series in

New York.