New York, June 16

End-of-season Broadway productions are usually of the "Blossom Time" or "light summer fare" school. This year's June audiences, though, are being given a preview of what may turn out to be a musical revolution that has been brewing in New York for decades. Gian-Carlo Menotti, young Italian-born American composer, has written an opera, and unlike most of his fellow composers, he has had the right combination of skill and luck to get it produced-at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre along with his curtain-raiser, "The Telephone."

Critics have been railing at the Metropolitan Opera for ages countless for not putting on worth while modern works, but in their attacks they have failed to consider a potent question: is the Met fit to present any opera except the 19th century warhorses on which it concentrates? To this opera-goer, anyway, the current production of "The Medium" answers that question with a strong negative.

Using a Broadway theatre makes it certain at the start that everyone will be able to see and hear everything for exactly half the price he would pay for a sightless, soundless seat in the Met. And the production of the Menotti work by the Ballet Society, a nonprofit group organized just this year to encourage new ventures in music and dance, so far outdistances anything the Metropolitan ever dreamed of that it is like a different artistic field entirely.

In that setting, "The Medium" is a complete musical-dramatic synthesis which absorbs its audiences as few plays or concerts ever could. The story, which like the music and lyrics is by Menotti, is a fascinating study of a fake medium who goes mad when the spirits she produces mechanically for her seances' begin to appear unasked. The opera in Menotti's hands and those of the Ballet Society is far more than the usual Metropolitan parade of dummies with voices; Menotti probes far into the characters of the degenerate medium, her mute servant and kind daughter, and the pathetic customers who make the seance an unforgettable scene.

Menotti's music is as remarkable as his dramatic talents. "The Medium" is by no means revolutionary or even experimental in form like "Four Saints" or "Mother of Us All," but the music is exactly right-no more nor less-for its frightening story. Menotti is a composer who can be described only as appealing; his music uses modern devices, manages to attract the listener without letting him out-of the grip of the opera in toto. He uses chiefly a semirecitative style, but he proves conclusively his ability to write an aria with an exceptionally lovely song which he gives the daughter near the close of the first act.

All of the singers in "The Medium" are actors also, with Marie Powers contributing a particularly fine bit as the spiritualist. The staging-by Menotti, too-is unusual, with an cerie touch in the last act that has to be seen. On both these counts the very thought of the Metropolitan doing the opera is foolish, for the necessity of using old costumes and old settings and that unique operatic brand of acting on the huge Met stage would spoil Menotti's work.

Perhaps, therefore, the future of modern opera lies on the stage and not in the old opera houses, which will still supply the voices and the size and the glamour for Mozart and Verdi and Wagner and their lessers. The composers seem to be aiming in that direction, for Benjamin Britten, as well as Menotti, has written operas for chamber orchestra and small cast. Britten's second, "The Rape of Lucretia," is on a Chicago stage now. If it comes to New York next year and is as much of a success as "The Medium" (still going strong on ticket sales), a new and happy method for reviving the art of opera-writing may have been discovered.