The Courier-Journal from Louisville, Kentucky • Page 176

Louisville's "Mr. Opera" The career of Moritz Bomhard is itself a 25-season drama set to music By F. W. by RICHARD NUGENT. of the basketball? Kentucky opera Was threaten Colonels the the doom team, future of a June casualty this year, sealed by a community craze for coloratura singing? People who for 25 years have held their breath at the often precarious health of the Kentucky Opera Association (KOA) remember how they rubbed their eyes in disbelief at what they read in their newspapers last June.

In a well-publicized onslaught, J. Bruce Miller, legal counsel to professional basketball players, asked: Why does "this community go overboard about opera when we're losing something is, the that means more to more people?" In their rambling, tree-shaded home, the wife of Moritz Bomhard, who is Louisville's "Mr. Opera," showed him the newspaper account of Miller's eruption. "'Moritz's response was characteristic," Mrs. Bomhard said later.

"'He wanted to know why, since it was about opera, the interview was on the sports pages?" Tennis, not basketball, is the sport that turns on Bomhard, who is the one to shoulder the blame if the community is overboard about lyric drama. (Actually, it now appears that in a moment of great exasperation Miller was indulging in conversational overkill in his comments about enthusiasm for opera in this community.) Bomhard founded KOA 25 years ago this season and has been its artistic director, unpaid set painter, and pinch-hitting rehearsal pianist ever since. It never would have occurred to him that opera and basketball, a sport in which 7-foot-2 Artis Gilmore earns more money than the Metropolitan Opera ever F. W. WOOLSEY of the Sunday Magazine staff has attended many operas as music critic for The Louisville Times.

paid Caruso, might be mentioned in the same breath. You would have had to explain to Bomhard who Gilmore is. "Would you believe it, he didn't know who Mickey Mantle is," said a young and pretty blonde of the KOA administrative staff. "I had to tell him who the Osmond Brothers are, Bomhard grew up in Old World culture and makes no bones about preferring art, music, and conversation that have roots in the past. On the other hand, he is not oblivious to today's civic responsibilities.

When the public-school system whacked away at music programs in a hasty effort to balance the school budget, Bomhard got into that act in a hurry, with a strong letter protesting the judgment that music could be dispensed with first. While Bomhard cares little for either television entertainment or television sports, he manages considerable diversity of interest and activity despite the con- Whether conducting the opera orchestra in a performance (facing page) or working with the musicians at a rehearsal (above), Bomhard gives his all. centration on music that his career imposes. There is, for example, the speed demon Bomhard, whose fast driving has put gray hairs into the coiffures of the more nervous among his passengers and has put points on his driving record in Frankfort. He has had to attend driving school, too.

There is Bomhard the autocrat of opera rehearsals whose muttered imprecations, a mixture of German and English, Continued.