Word: meyerowitz
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Manhattan saw a third new opera last week, when the Mannes College of Music presented Eastward in Eden, by Jan Meyerowitz (TIME, Jan. 30, 1950), based on the 1947 play by Dorothy Gardner. The German-born composer chose an American subject, the tragic, frustrated life of New England Poetess Emily Dickinson, but gave the frail story a pretentious treatment that would have been better suited to Aida or a Greek tragedy...
...Poet Langston Hughes seldom wrote anything more simple and effective than his poem Cross. Some people liked it so well that he turned it into a play, Mulatto, and it ran on Broadway for more than a year in 1935-36. Two years ago, when German-born Composer Jan Meyerowitz, of the Berkshire Music Center, asked him for a modern opera libretto, Poet Hughes reached for his Cross again. Last week audiences at Columbia University's Brander Matthews Hall heard the two-act result, The Barrier...
...Composer Meyerowitz had done his best to keep up with the fast-moving plot. The singers, particularly little Negro Soprano Muriel (Carmen Jones) Rahn, who played the part of the housekeeper, did their best with the difficult intervals in his arias. But for most of the evening, the best the Stravinsky-model music achieved was the role of a first-class sound-track accompaniment. Poet Hughes's story could always manage without the music; but the music, for all the exciting quality that Composer Meyerowitz had given it, needed company...