That supreme musical watercolorist of English post-Romanticism, Frederick Delius, is known best today for such delicately tinted orchestral tableaux as Brigg Fair, Over the Hills and Far Away and On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring. Last week at the Opera Society of Washington, his opera Koanga made it clear that Delius. who died in 1934, could also be effective with strong colors on a broad canvas.
A voodoo Aida of sorts, Koanga is set in the ante helium South and tells the story of an African prince (Koanga, also a voodoo priest) sold into slavery on a plantation. He falls in love with a mulatto slave girl, and eventually makes a bold —but tragic—dash for freedom. Koanga's moods and moments range from a tender love scene to a fiery voodoo incantation. Everywhere, Delius' music flows effortlessly in and out, over and under the libretto (based on the novel The Grandissimes by George Washington Cable) with the caressing quality of rhapsody at its best. Save for a few instances of post-Wagnerian schmalz, the score is astonishingly original in its chromatic colorations and declamatory singing style.
Koanga's dramatic strength makes it all the more remarkable that this was the first staging ever of a Delius opera in the U.S. The man responsible for the revival was Stage Director Frank Corsaro, on loan from the New York City Opera. He reinforced Koanga's quality of poetic make-believe and pantheistic sultriness perfectly by using slides and films (photographed especially in the Louisiana bayous), as well as surrealistic light patterns. So well did production and opera blend, so superb the singing of Baritone Eugene Holmes and Soprano Claudia Lindsey in the lead roles, that sellout audiences erupted into shouting ovations at the end.
Corsaro has his keen eye on other Delius operas. As he points out, no less an authority than the late Sir Thomas Beecham, Delius' friend and greatest champion, considered A Village Romeo and Juliet and Fennimore and Gerda infinitely superior to Koanga.