Composer Peggy Glanville-Hicks is a modernist who distrusts twelve-tone music as too coldly intellectual, electronic music as more engineering than art. In her own search for originality, she frequently uses folk rhythms and melodies from India, Spain, Morocco and the Far East, which she fuses into strong compositions. Last week a fine new Glanville-Hicks work, an opera titled Nausicaa, received its premiere at the history-laden Herodes Atticus Theater in Athens. Inspired by Greek folk themes, it had an unusual librettist: Greek Scholar, Author and Poet Robert Graves.
Graves, 66, had never worked on an opera before. But when Composer Glanville-Hicks read his Homer's Daughter, she knew at once that she wanted to write music to it. The two worked intermittently for four years. Graves's story was inspired by Samuel Butler's theory that not Homer but a woman wrote the Odyssey, since it is gentler and more humorous than the Iliad and deals more with women's activities. In Graves's version. Princess Nausicaa hears a group of young noblemen, her suitors, planning to overthrow her father. King Alcinous. She plots against the suitors, sees them all killed, and asks only one thing as her reward: "I demand that in future it will be My version of a faithful Penelope My story of this palace war My account of the part women played that you will sing."
Composer Glanville-Hicks wrapped the story in sinewy, astringent music ("bony and strong, like the Greek landscape") played by an orchestra deliberately limited to 60 instruments. The vocal parts were highly declamatory, gained added drama from their use of the metric cadence of Greek folk song. The Athens critics were impressed. "An idiom unique of its kind," wrote one. "The composer does away with the ballast of conventional opera."
Australia-born Composer Glanville-Hicks, 48, is one of the few women who have turned a successful hand to opera: Nausicaa was preceded by The Transposed Heads, a three-act adaptation of the Thomas Mann novel. In composing her exotic song cycles (Profiles from China, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird), she first writes the score, then tries it out, not on the piano, as most composers do, but on a Japanese koto, a zither with 13 strings. Her next project, an opera to be based on Lawrence Durrell's only play, Sappho, may be her last work: her eyes, overtaxed by years of reading and music copying, are failing badly, and she fears eventual blindness.