Mourning comes again.(Coda)

Although I didn't know where it would take me, opera captured me at age ten. It was at a Metropolitan Opera Saturday matinee of La Traviata with Frederick Jagel, Lawrence Tibbett and the incomparable Licia Albanese. Soon my parents were taking me to New York from New Jersey to see her weekly radio show. I would also be taken to Studio 8H to witness the great Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony. Afterwards, I would run down to the stage to cheer and look into the old man's fierce eyes. It wasn't long before I realized I was looking into eyes that had looked into those of Verdi while playing cello under the Maestro in preparation for the premiere of Otello. Unimportant memories in themselves perhaps, but they indicate something important about the initial impressions music, its fantasies and realities, were beginning to make on me. The rapture of opera had invaded me.

At age twenty, I began writing an opera myself, based on John Millington Synge's Riders to the Sea. What I remember of it is that some of the climactic vocal gestures are remarkably similar to those in Mourning Becomes Electra. And over the next few years, in my early twenties, three operas of mine--trial balloons, if you will--were produced: The Tower (Santa Fe Opera), Sotoba Komachi and Escorial (Music in Our Time Series, 92nd Street Y). Already, I had found my voice, writing not in a traditional recitative style but in a natural dramatic extension, a kind of arioso that was almost always at the service of song and never enslaved to prosody for its own sake. I sought ways to expand and vary how words can sing through the drama behind them, and what, through the vocal personality and character of the protagonists, one can discover within the meaning of those words.

In my late twenties, I took the plunge and began work on the opera that was, for better or worse, to overshadow my entire subsequent life as a composer. Thereafter I was not Marvin David Levy but Marvin David Levy who wrote Mourning Becomes Electra for the Metropolitan Opera. And the water was hot.

The majority of the press reviews were glorious, hailing the work as "the long-awaited great American opera" (both Delos Smith, UPI, 1967, and Lawrence A. Johnson, The New Criterion, 1998). One important critic thought it less than glorious. That was the late Harold C. Schonberg of The New York Times only the chief critic of the chief paper of, arguably, the chief city of the Western music world. While allowing that some might like the piece, he was nor among them. That didn't stop the Met front scheduling it for a second season. But after two further seasons in Europe, the opera vanished. ...