WHAT NEXT?(The Greater Good)(Our Town)(Opera review)

July was New American Opera Month in the purple hills of upstate New York and western Massachusetts. You could hardly drive your Smart car from the lesbian bed-and-breakfast to the organic farm stand without running over an adaptation of a literary property. Stephen Hartke's "The Greater Good" made its debut at the Glimmerglass Opera, in Cooperstown. The Lake George Opera, in Saratoga Springs, presented Ned Rorem's "Our Town," which had its premiere in Indiana earlier this year. Elliott Carter's opera "What Next?" (1999) belatedly had its first American staging, at Tanglewood. Back in New York, Elliot Goldenthal's "Grendel" was the centerpiece of the Lincoln Center Festival, in a Julie Taymor extravaganza. These performances, all well attended, came at the end of a musical season that brought John Adams's "Doctor Atomic" to the San Francisco Opera, Tobias Picker's "An American Tragedy" to the Met, and Lowell Liebermann's "Miss Lonelyhearts" to Juilliard.

Are any of these new operas towering masterworks that will alter the course of music history while winning the hearts of millions? People have been asking that loaded question of American opera for a hundred years, and the way they phrase it almost demands a negative answer. Better to ask whether a new work is strong enough to hold the stage. If it does, it has a future, and the masterpiece-sorting can be done by later generations. "The Greater Good," "Our Town," and "Grendel" passed this test: lustily, wistfully, and by a hair.

Hartke's "The Greater Good" is a tightly constructed, vividly imagined piece that may mark the emergence of a major opera composer. The excellent libretto, by Philip Littell, is based on Maupassant's story "Boule de Suif," which tells of the misadventures of a menagerie of bourgeois and aristocratic types who are travelling by coach in the middle of the Franco-Prussian War. A Prussian commandant stops the coach and lets them know that they can proceed only if Boule de Suif, a bighearted, big-boned prostitute who is on board, services his needs. She patriotically refuses. The others play elaborate psychological games to make her give in. They are greater whores than she. The challenge of this scathing little tale is that not a lot actually happens. Hartke seizes control with a subtle riot of sprung rhythms, colliding tunes, jazzy rave-ups, onomatopoeia (cat lovers will want a forthcoming Naxos recording if only for the Comtesse de Breville's mewling, chirruping aria, "I miss my cat"), musical in-jokes (listen for the would-be-transcendent "Rosenkavalier" trio that never gets off the ground), and, at the end, a delicately shattering anthem of despair. Hartke is celebrated for his orchestral music, which mixes Stravinskyan neoclassicism, minimalism, jazz, and Balinese gamelan. The dazzle of his orchestration was no surprise; the sizzle of his theatre sense was big news.

The melancholy Americana of Thornton Wilder's play "Our Town" has long fascinated American composers. Aaron Copland, who wrote music for the 1940 film adaptation, wanted to make an opera out of it, but Wilder did not cooperate. Ned Rorem, who has written only one other evening-length opera in his eighty-two years, eventually received permission from the playwright's estate. The drama plays to his strengths. Its mundane scenes of all-American life--baseball, drunkenness, gossip, marriage--elicit from Rorem the clean-lined, crisp-figured style that typified American music before the Cold War, and to which he has stayed uncompromisingly true. The unsettling transformation of the third act, in which we see the world through the eyes of the dead, makes him go deeper; at times, the music becomes uncharacteristically turbulent and grand. (Rorem has always prided himself on his Francophile restraint.) Wilder's ghosts remind us that we never appreciate the transient glories of daily existence until it is too late. The very fabric of the score--its luminous orchestration, its pearly vocal lines, its gently pulsing rhythms, its celestially circling song of young love--evokes the mundane beauty that we overlook.

J. D. McClatchy, who sleekly adapted "Our Town" for Rorem, is the librettist of the moment; somehow, he also found time to write "Miss ...