American Opera.(Brief Article)(Review)

American Opera by Elise K. Kirk University of Illinois Press, 472 pp. $34.95

The press release for Elise K. Kirks new book claims it is a "lively history of one of America's liveliest arts." But the title -- American Opera -- is silent on history. Kirk must know that at its best, history is not only the story of past facts but an examination, an assessment of these facts, as well as some suggestion as to why things moved as they did.

Thoroughly neutral, American Opera is chronological, orderly and agreeable to read. It is also so broadminded, so uncritical, so disinclined to support one aesthetic over another that the most disparate composers often are grouped together in misleading ways. Commenting on how "composers of the late 1950s and 1960s" no longer could be found "close to home in American settings and traditions like those of The Tender Land [Aaron Copland] or The Ballad of Baby Doe [Douglas Moore]," Kirk writes that "Samuel Barber, Marvin David Levy, Hugo Weisgall and Jack Beeson met challenges with fresh imagination and dramatic invention."

Yet the influence of an older artist on a younger one, no matter how complex the relationship, may well transcend the factor of being part of a decade. Moore was chairman of the music department at Columbia University when Beeson joined the faculty in 1945. They worked together on a day-to-day basis for almost twenty years. That fact, as well as even the most ...