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The second act begins, curiously, with the overture, which is the composer's way of thumbing his nose at the New York critical establishment, Carmine Hess in particular, that curmudgeonly pillar of tradition who probably also had his eye--but, then, didn't everyone?--on the executive conductorship of the Greenwich Conservatory. In his climb up the musical ladder, Davidson made countless enemies. After the famous signature prelude, A-flat, A-flat, G, and the subdominant E-major chord held for ten full measures, a presto-adagio alternation combines the warm ale-and-pot ambiance of Harry's with the discordant, nervous broken arpeggios we will soon associate with Leila's desperate scheme. Davidson loves to weave contrasting moods, and this is an excellent example, minor sevenths vying with perfect fifths, the harp petulantly competing with the contrabassoon.
As the warrior bints leave, Buyda, daughter of the Master Armorer, Greff (who has been unnoticed until now), steps from behind a boulder, lowers her lace veil, and laments that Prowlux has been driven so mad by power and ambition that he desires to couple not with her but with a human female, one Bea DeVries, in fact, whom he saw televised last quarter at the annual Saint Camilla song competition, when that shameless person of extrabintian origin was all in tulle and lilies. "What do human women have," sings Buyda, "that we honest bint women don't?" Buyda reveals her plan: She will don a suit of armor, disguise herself as a commando, and join the invasion force. At the appropriate moment she will plunge her serrated ceremonial bronze dagger deep into the pure white bosom of this despised DeVries alien, and then Buyda will take her own life. "For how can I continue," she sings in her wretchedness, "without my Prowlux?" |
When the curtain rises, we find ourselves in a bint city. A chorus of bints sings of their forthcoming invasion of the Dalminian Empire, sun Alpha Cygni, planet Creeth. At last they will drive out the human dogs and reconsecrate the ancient subterranean temples. The bint captain, Prowlux, tells Tywliq, his confidante and second, that the invasion will be successful this time because they have found a human traitor to turn off the protective force field at the precise moment the bint ships materialize from hyperspace. Tywliq says, "Those humans have no morality. They betray their kind at the drop of a hat. They will sell even their maternal grandmothers for filthy lucre. They are scum." Prowlux tells him that money was not the bait this time. No, there is something that motivates humans even more than money. It is love. Prowlux and Tywliq sing a duet, "What is love? A foolish human thing." Davidson, thumbing his nose yet again at the hide-bound musicologists of Julliard and Lincoln Center, playfully incorporates chortling into the song, to produce a uniquely comic yodeling effect. "The human heart takes over, chortle-chortle, the human brain takes flight." General Wricob enters with his entourage and gives Prowlux special orders not to let the humans destroy the DNA lab when their battered remnants retreat into the indigenous scrub. Part of the invasion plan, we learn, is to change the human genome itself. The bints, taking over the DNA lab, will make humans weak and submissive for all eternity by manipulating the 34M-44F-XA alleles of the second chromosome to the left. "Guanine, adenine, cytosine," sings the general's entourage, to raucous saxophones and sinister cymbals.
