Montezuma as "a huge step in the history of American music." Reflecting a few days later, Davies conceded that the "profusion of musical detail obscured, for many listeners, the basic simplicity of Sessions' musical material", and that the "surface" of the music is "by no means always ingratiating" but nevertheless maintained that, "if one can take in the music as a whole, its enormous gestures and long articulations begin to fall into place, and Sessions emerges as a great lyricist with a full and virile melodic sweep." For "unprepared ears", Davies recommended the best approach is through Sessions's "readily assimilated Fifth Symphony ... the stylistic key to the most difficult section of the opera, the third and final act." An unnamed correspondent for the Times, reporting on the Berlin premiere, found the score "spare and mechanical", and felt that listening "requires far more application than most theatregoers are prepared to give it". Defects included "complex scoring" and "impenetrable subtleties of the vocal line", so that the "strain on the ear is excessive". After hearing both the American premiere in Boston and the 1982 Juilliard production, Peter G. Davis concurred: "the opera's flaws only become more apparent and aggravating with each hearing". Citing the "syntactically tortured libretto", combined with the thick textures of Sessions's music, "the ear becomes lost in a sea of gray monotony". In sum, "there can only be one sad conclusion: Sessions has written a terrible opera, a tragic waste of a valuable composer's precious time." Martin Brody, on the contrary, finds the overlapping, complex vocal lines consistently reinforce "an ironic undercutting of virtually all the ethical and political positions taken by the characters", so that the portrayed events are "viewed as tragic and absurd in equal parts". Conceding that the language of the libretto is largely "complicated and awkward", the drama nevertheless is "psychologically and politically focussed at all times". The music is "among Sessions’s richest: dense and colourful, gesturally graphic throughout, dramatically motivated and fully integrated at all structural levels." Notes Sources Anon. 1964. 'American Opera Staged in Berlin First'. The Times (6 May). Brody, Martin. 1992. 'Montezuma (ii)' in The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, edited by Stanley Sadie. London: Macmillan Publishers. . Davies, Peter Maxwell. 1964a. 'Sessions's Opera Stirs Berliners: "Montezuma" Is Greeted by Violent Reactions'. New York Times (Tuesday, April 21): 43. Davies, Peter Maxwell. 1964b. '"Montezuma" Creates a Stir in Berlin'. New