For the People

IF YOU LIKE MUSIC, and if you don't divorce your liking from the contemporary world, there's no excuse for you to miss the Quincy House Arts Festival's current double bill.

To start off, they give you The Soldier's Tale. Now we all know that only in The Rite of Spring did Stravinsky truly succeed in his lifelong quest for a musical equivalent of Last Tango in Paris. But it seems to me that The Soldier's Tale comes much closer to bringing music into the twentieth century we know today, the century in which the common people--in the poems of Ezra Pound as well as the jungles of Indochina -- insist on asserting their rightful sway.

In The Soldier's Tale, Stravinsky began to take music away from the academicians, the esthetes, and the rapturous-on-demand, and to give it back to the people. The plot, which C.F. Ramuz set down in inspired doggerel, is a folk tale: a soldier sells his fiddle to the devil, and returns home to find that years have passed and everyone has forgotten him. He tricks the devil, cures a princess, and marries her, but the devil warns him not to try to go back to his native village. He tries anyway. The return of music to the people doesn't stop at the plot's source, however. You can hear it in the circus tunes and old-country fiddle solos that keep seeping into the score, or in Stravinsky's indifference -- though I suppose the score is pretty enough -- to what is merely "pretty," ("beauty does not consist in letting the ears lie back," Charles Ives said). He insists instead on treating the solo instruments and the singing or acerbic melodies as individuals, free to speak for themselves for as long as it takes them. Above all you can hear it in his trust for the most vulgar, most basic element of music: "Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music," wrote Pound, "and music atrophies when it gets too far from the dance."

Perhaps not since Bach put all of music into The Well-Tempered Clavier had a composer trusted dance as implicitly as Stravinsky in The Soldier's Tale. And because he trusted it -- because he knew the rhythms would keep on dancing happily at his listeners' eardrums -- like Bach, he let the parts interact as freely and as clashingly as they wanted to, without needing to worry about whether people would be able to follow it. So with the dance, intellect came back into music, and with it the sometimes painful irony that contemporary history entailed.

THE IMPORTANCE of the dance is plainest when The Soldier's Tale is staged, because there's a long dance at the end of the first part. In this production, the dance, like everything else, is excellent. Eleanor Lindsay, the director, has Marie Kohler rise from her illness slowly, turning first to Bernard Holmberg, the Narrator, and only at his direction, timidly, and then with increasing delight, to the Soldier, Terry Emerson. Kohler can dominate the stage just by putting on her cloak; and Holmberg and Pope Brock as the Devil are virtually as good as the other two.

I don't think Stephen Schmidt's orchestra, unaccountably unlisted in the program, missed a note, although the work consists almost entirely of difficult solo passages. The orchestra's tone was phenomenal. Also unaccountably unlisted is the costume designer, who in these days of returning prisoners of war adds several dimensions to the Soldier's repeated complaint, "I'm a ghost among the living, "merely by putting him in Vietnam-style fatigues, and then compounds the effect by letting the devil, for all the world like a suburban liberal, offer him a blue collar and a red bow tie.

The final tableau -- The Devil hanging triumphantly from the Soldier's neck while the Narrator grins and Schmidt brings the drum-roll to a climax -- caps everything convincingly.

I was a bit surprised not to find A Country Doctor anticlimactic. It's a one-act adaptation of a Kafka story by Hans Werner Henze, consisting entirely of a dramatic monologue by the title character. Philip Kelsey turns in a remarkable performance, in which every word is distinct and every word radiates a baffled, innocent hopelessness that progresses into insanity. The refusal of the people around him to seize responsibility for their own lives without benefit of elergy, doctors, or other agents of the state combined with his own inabilities, makes his life increasingly unbearable: "What do they want from doctors," he asks, "miracles?" I thought Henze's music went on for a while after it had said all it had to say. But Quincy's production, which relies mainly on film projections, kept things from every getting dull. And at least most of what the music says--the patients' chorale of faith, or the sudden cessation of the orchestra's conventional dissonance for the doctor's "He took my word and lay still," or his waltztime bursts of antic merriment-- is interesting and important.