The Courier-Journal from Louisville, Kentucky • Page 209

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Bombard's foreboding about the direction Germany was taking under Hitler curdled some of his pleasure in being back in his native country, however. He determined to return to the United States. Back in New York, Bomhard pursued his education and then his career and buried his personal problems under a load of work. He kept his residence in New York and commuted to Princeton. In his free time he wrote three symphonies, a concerto for strings, chamber, piano, and vocal music.

To supplement his income, he coached singers, trained a choral group, and taught piano. After the death of his wife in 1945 and with the end of the war, Bomhard became an opera impresario on a very small scale. The turn of events was the result of his going back to school, this time to Columbia Teachers College in New York. He received a master's degree in 1947 and soon was traveling extensively around the eastern U.S. as head of a small, professional opera troupe called Opera for College and then re-named New Lyric Stage.

The little company went through Louisville but didn't perform here. At about the same time, Bomhard was composer-arranger for the Philharmonic Piano Quartet and composer of incidental music for Margo Jones of Houston regional theater fame. The sheer variety of his musical experience has stood Bomhard in good stead during his quarter-century of producing and conducting opera in Louisville. He was first invited here in 1949 to lead a venture in opera using mostly local resources. The opera of that debut was "The Marriage of Figaro." The present Mrs.

Bomhard, who sings professionally under her maiden name, Charme Riesley, was the Cherubino of that 1949 production. Three years after that venture in grassroots operatic experiment, Bomhard agreed to come to Louisville to found and be the artistic director of an opera company that would perform regularly. He has said it was not much of a wrench to give up his base in New York for Louisville. "I was getting tired of all that traveling," he said. Thus began the reign in Louisville of Heinrich Hans Claus Moritz von Bomhard, descendant of a family that can trace its genealogy back to the Middle Ages, in the improbable role of opera master to a community only then awakening to the potential importance of its symphony orchestra.

Louisville hitherto hadn't indicated much support for any- thing more cultural than the Standard Sanitary Marching Band. "He has carried an immense load for nearly a quarter-century," commented Fletcher Smith, the widely admired Louisville voice teacher. "He has had the courage to stay on, fighting, and today is producing operas of a complexity and ambition I would have thought impossible in 1952." Smith had known Bomhard at Juilliard and also sang in that initial performance of "Figaro." For years, Bomhard designed the sets (and for the first half-dozen years built them, too), directed the stage action, played the rehearsal piano, and conducted the orchestra. In recent seasons some of the load has been lifted from Bomhard's shoulders. Often the set design and stage direction are by men and women imported for the occasion, with Bomhard's primary attention concentrated on the orchestra.

There is also a new KOA business manager who used to sell stocks and bonds, and then learned the music business working for an artists' management agency in New York. All this new talent costs money. The KOA budget has grown so big that Bomhard, who used to scrounge props and velvet for scenery and ran his first season on less than $10,000, is panicky about zooming costs. But truth to tell, he reminisces fondly about the days of scrimping, when he himself picked up props in a rented truck. He was lucky, he says, to be able to have his finger on every phase of the opera, from the initial pencil sketches for the sets and the invention of lively stage action to the finished stage picture at curtain time, with Bomhard in the orchestra pit.

The KOA opera production that will unfold Friday and Saturday nights at the Macauley Theatre is one of the new order, with sets coming in from elsewhere, and an imported stage director. But it will be an event invested with emotion for Bomhard. He studied composition at Columbia with Dr. Douglas Moore, who later wrote the opera "The Ballad of Baby Doe," which Bomhard is conducting this week. The "Baby Doe" on the stage of the Macauley thus will be Bomhard's tribute to a teacher and musician whom he greatly admired and revered.

He has cast it as strongly as he could and he has hopes that it will occupy a special niche among the novelties he has introduced to KOA audiences. Apart from Carlisle Floyd's "Susannah," "Baby Doe" is the only opera ever done by KOA that comes to mind as having an American setting. Opera-in- Continued EXTRA SERVICES ALTERATIONS REWEAVING REPAIRS rains Thousands of Americans all across the country are losing weight with the help of the Slim-Line Candy Medication Diet Plan. Slim-Line is different two ways it's scientifically medicated to help you control your appetite anytime, anywhere and it's a taste delight to enjoyinstead of high calorie fattening snacks. Let the Slim-Line Candy Medication Diet Plan help you get down to your most attractive size and figure.

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