Revisiting "The Prairie".(The Talk of the Town)(Lukas Foss attends the Brooklyn Philharmonic's rehearsal)

Lukas Foss, the composer, turns eighty-five in August, and his hearing is not what it used to be, but when he attended a rehearsal the other day by the Brooklyn Philharmonic of his choral work "The Prairie" he listened attentively, sitting very upright in a hard-backed chair, nodding precisely in time to the music. It had been a decade since Foss had last heard an orchestra play the piece, and sixty-three years since "The Prairie," which is based on a poem by Carl Sandburg, had its New York premiere, at Town Hall, when Foss was just twenty-two.

"The poetry was very visual, and about landscape, and ideal for music," Foss explained during a break in the rehearsal, which was taking place in a vaulted chamber on the tenth floor of Riverside Church. (The piece was performed earlier this summer at Lincoln Center, and also in Bridgehampton.) There had been a downpour that morning, and he was still wearing a raincoat over a tan sports jacket, dark slacks, and black loafers with thick white soles. His eyes, behind glasses, were blue and very bright. "Think of cowboys, and how all young people idealize them," said Foss's wife, Cornelia Foss, who is a painter and who compensates for her husband's diminished vigor--he has Parkinson's--with her own.

Foss, whose family fled first Berlin and then Paris, had never seen the prairie when he wrote the work, and he still never has. Lukas Fuchs, as he was then known, arrived on the Upper West Side of New York City in 1937. "He slept under the piano, because there wasn't room for a bed in the apartment," Mrs. Foss said. "At age sixteen, he kept himself alive by giving piano lessons and playing for dance companies." In the manner of ...