Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera last week put on its first world premiere in five seasons, and it was a queer one.
Called The Island God, it told a fantastic, metaphysical story, a conflict between an ancient Greek god and a modern castaway on a Mediterranean isle. In the final scene, the castaway discovers the grotesque truth: the god fears him, knowing that the man's faith in him is all that keeps the god alive. Defiantly the man shatters the god's sacred altar, forcing the god to destroy him and, in so doing, to destroy himself. The opera had so little drama in...
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