Music: Pons in San Francisco

Some 3,500 people in the new War Memorial Opera House, 15,000 in huge Exposition Auditorium and another great crowd outside City Hall, heard pretty little Lily Pons do her trills and cadenzas in San Francisco last week. People who were too poor or too late to get tickets for performances in the Opera House did not mind much until Lily Pons started taking her San Francisco audiences by storm fortnight ago. Then they recalled that the new house had been publicly subscribed, protested until opera authorities had loudspeakers installed in the Auditorium and over the City Hall steps, transmitted a performance of Lucia di Lammermoor free.

The crowd in the Auditorium saw as well as heard Lily Pons. After the Lucia Mad Scene she whizzed there with a motorcycle escort, received a chrysanthemum “key to San Francisco’s heart” from its Florist-Mayor Angelo J. Rossi. The popular demonstrations reminded oldtimers of San Francisco’s last great musical excitement, twelve years ago when chunky Luisa Tetrazzini sang for 100,000 at Lotta’s Fountain (TIME, Oct. 17).