The Mighty Casey is subtitled ''a baseball opera'' and without a knowledge of the rules of that game you won't understand the plot. Casey's crucial act, in the penultimate scene, is to ''strike out'' (I don't think it means that he hits somebody). ''How does a man survive such a thing? How does he live with himself'', muses the narrator. The epilogue may provide an answer, but it is played in dumb-show, and no summary of the scene is provided. The music is at times rather close to the home-spun simplicity of Weill's Down in the Valley, at others to Bernstein's vein of frank sentimentality, both seasoned with the syncopated athleticism that will be familiar to anyone who knows Schuman's symphonies. There are marked overtones of American college songs (I can imagine the work going down rather well after a dinner celebrating a more successful ball-game than the one chronicled in the plot) but much of the dialogue and a good deal of the action is set to a sort of all-purpose declamatory recitative-arioso, adequate for its purpose perhaps if you're able to follow what is going on, desperately thin and protracted if you're not.
A Question of Taste has no such comprehensibility problem; quite the reverse. It's based on a Roald Dahl story about a father who wagers the hand of his daughter in marriage against a guest's ability to recognize a claret from an obscure vineyard. To set such a threadbare anecdote to music might seem a waste of time, but Schuman was fortunate in his librettist J. D. McClatchy, who not only fleshed out the story with extra characters and incident, and moved its period back to an age when fathers really did bestow their daughters' hands (Dahl, believe it or not, set the story in the present day) but also versified it competently, even wittily, and provided a number of very tempting cues for arias. Alas, William Schuman the fluent and resourceful symphonist seems to have had a cloth ear for words. He not only ignored most of McClatchy's cues for songs but most of his metrical ingenuities, rhymes and jokes as well. What we have instead is yet more declamation, yards and yards of it, usually rather strenuous and angular. The 'heroine' has a dull waltz-song with some graceless coloratura to it, the lovers have a serviceable, rather Menotti-like duet, but there is very little humour and so poor is the dramatic pacing that at 54 minutes the opera seems interminable. Decent enough student performances, briskly conducted, but a rather edgy, metallic recorded sound.'