Music: Mrs. Christmas

Someone in the gallery began to clap first; as the music faded, the applause gathered and grew quicker; then voices cheered, diplomats and dowagers crowded toward the stage on which a girl was nodding and laughing and stooping to pick up flowers. The enthusiasm that greets an opera singer’s debut is sometimes the lightest, the most sudden, the most exciting that any artist can ever achieve. Dorothy Speare, last week in Washington, was enjoying a moment that she must always remember for its exquisite gaiety, thrown to her like a bouquet.

She had found successes before: when she published her first novel, Dancers in the Dark (in 1922); when she sang in Italy last winter. In the Washington National Opera Festival, singing Mignon, she was only making her U. S. debut. When on two later evenings in the same week she equalled her achievement in the difficult mezzo-soprano of the first, newsgatherers jostled at the stage door. They learned that her writings had furnished the wherewithal for her musical education; that even now she was writing a play for famed David Belasco to produce and her fifth novel; that her real name, which belongs to a onetime singer now a banker and her husband, is Mrs. Christmas.

Other notable ingredients in the gala week of Washington opera supplied social and musical excitement. Offspring of three presidents (Cleveland, Roosevelt, Wilson) sat behind stiff shirts or strings of pearls; French Ambassador Paul Claudel was advertised as a patron. On the stage appeared Mary Lewis and Jeanne Gordon of the Metropolitan; famed French tenor Maurice Capitaine, sent specially for the occasion by the French Ministry of Fine Arts, had arrived the day before Mignon. Plaudits for him perhaps surpassed those tendered Novelist-singer Christmas.