According to Grove, Hugo Weisgall is “perhaps America’s most important composer of operas”, and of his full-length ones Six Characters is his “most theatrically successful”. It was first performed in 1959 by the New York City Opera, but after a revival the following year it was not heard again until the staging in Chicago of which this is a live recording. “Theatrically successful” therefore means not that it has been widely performed but that it works well on stage, and there is good evidence of that here: the audience is audibly absorbed by every word of the drama, laughing at the jokes, in suspense at the twists and turns of the plot, warmly applauding an aria in praise of opera singers. Pirandello’s theatre director, his stage taken over by six characters from an unfinished play in search of a new author who will give the drama of their lives some meaning, has of course here become the director of an opera company, who are grimly and reluctantly beginning to rehearse ‘Weisgall’s Temptation of St Anthony’. “I know that some of you don’t like it”, he admits, “To tell the truth I hate this modern, tuneless stuff myself. But... man cannot live by Faust alone.” Clever: at a stroke Weisgall has not only one of the most gripping and cunningly plotted plays of the century on his side, but he can also mine a rich vein of operatic jokes.
One of the reviews in 1959 described Six Characters as “almost breathless in pace”. It is; for an opera lasting not much over two hours very little of Pirandello has been omitted. Weisgall’s word-setting is fast and declamatory, halting often but always very briefly for arias, ensembles and choruses. His style is chromatic but never atonal; he achieves this by concentrating at any given moment on motives drawn from a fairly restricted range of pitches. Much of the musical interest lies in ingenious motivic working in the orchestra. In this very competent performance the orchestra sound on the small side and, no doubt in the interest of verbal clarity, they are pushed into the background by close focusing on the voices. But the vocal writing is angular and not very grateful (it must have been hell to learn) and it is often curiously insensitive to words or to situation.
It is characteristic of this opera that the mysterious arrival of the Six Characters is marked by an oddly effective invention in the woodwinds of the orchestra, but by little change in the vocal writing. A real sense of ample, lyrical line, or of the Six Characters’ strangeness and separateness, is not achieved until the final act, where the earnest eloquence of some of the Father’s music and a lovely (if brief) aria with chorus for the Step-daughter at last warm the opera into life. Until then I found myself admiring Weisgall’s stagecraft (or Pirandello’s) more than his responsiveness to a great play.'