Word: ibbetson
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...breezy, irreverent approach to the art. "The test of music," he once said, "is not the mathematics behind it, but how it sounds"-a test he applied to himself in some 50 highly popular works, most notably two romantic operas, The King's Henchman (1927) and Peter Ibbetson (1931), both performed by the Metropolitan and widely acclaimed as the first genuine U.S. contribution to the form...
...most successful American opera ever staged at the Metropolitan was Deems Taylor's Peter Ibbetson. At its premiere in 1931, it won 36 curtain calls, ran for four seasons. After that, Ibbetson disappeared from the Met's repertory, for no very clear reason. Says Composer Taylor: "After all, I can't go ring Mr. Bing's bell and say, 'Where's my opera?' " Last week, after a quarter-century, his opera was back-not at the Met but at New York's enterprising Empire State Festival...
...Ibbetson, based on the mistily romantic 19th century novel by George du Maurier, has to do with a young architect who meets the girl he once loved as a child in Paris, learns that she is married but continues to carry on a sort of astral affair with her in his dreams. The opera, like the book, juxtaposes scenes of fact and fantasy in a pre-Freudian demonstration of the relation between the inner and outer life. At Ibbetson's premiere, the hero's curiously frustrated longings were enough to reduce the audience to tears, but at last...
...career as a piano-roll puncher, vaudeville entertainer and poster artist, is not embarrassed to recall that he narrated Walt Disney's Fantasia, and thinks that U.S. music needs more corn to replace the "dry, squeezed lemon" of modernism. At 74 turning again to composition, Taylor says of Ibbetson: "I'd forgotten how good...
...Tibbett the Met scheduled rarely performed operas such as Verdi's Simon Boccanegra, and it was Tibbett, a longtime champion of English-language opera, who created the baritone roles in such contemporary American operas as Deems Taylor's The King's Henchman and Peter Ibbetson. To the title role of Louis Gruen-berg's The Emperor Jones he brought an eerie sense of terror, sending his great voice booming among the dwarfish, treelike forms that grew grotesquely on the Met's shadowy stage...