To the Editor:
The wonderful Terry Teachout dismisses John Harbison’s The Great Gatsby as “an overlong opera that is stolidly competent and hopelessly undramatic” [“American Opera In Progress,” March]. In detailing that opera’s faults, Mr. Teachout is clinically and brilliantly accurate. But he overlooks the zany, surrealistic power of the first 20-25 minutes of its second act, which, in addition to the immense public interest in the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, will assure Harbison’s new work an occasional place in many operatic repertories for years to come.
Mr. Teachout concludes that “American opera . . . will not come into its long-delayed maturity until a characteristically American genius leads the way,” and for him this genius will be a sort of American Benjamin Britten. Mr. Teachout forgets that there are geniuses, and then there are geniuses. If the new century’s geniuses resemble most of the last’s in their musical disposition, almost every performing classical-music institution will be out of business in 50 years.
Orchestral music does not need another Arnold Schoenberg; it needs a Tchaikovsky. Chamber music does not need another Alban Berg, or even a Britten; it needs a Puccini. In fact, we do not need a genius at all. Rather, we need a composer who will bring young people to concert halls by the busload.
Roger Kolb
Somerville, Massachusetts
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Terry Teachout writes:
I appreciate being called “wonderful,” so perhaps I can draw on my credit with Roger Kolb and encourage him to think twice, and maybe even a third time, about the best 20th-century music, by which I do not mean Schoenberg. I like Tchaikovsky and Puccini, too, but I like Prokofiev and Copland just as much, not to mention a long list of other wonderful composers active in the century just past, virtually all of whom figured in my “Masterpieces of the Century” series [April, May, June 1999]—a good starting point, if I do say so myself, for anyone who has been reluctant to explore the modern movement in classical music.
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