Music: Curtains Up

Signals for Curtains Up! sounded last week almost simultaneously in San Francisco and Chicago for another opera season. San Francisco’s curtain-raiser was a smoothly-run performance of Halevy’s La Juive, in which Tenor Giovanni Martinelli surpassed himself as the bearded old Jew while that plump, dependable songstress, Elisabeth Rethberg, took the part of the heroine who is finally plopped into a caldron, boiled in oil. In Chicago, Soprano Rosa Raisa was condemned to sizzle at the stake in Respighi’s La Fiamma, proved her popularity by getting loud applause when neither her singing nor acting was more than mediocre.

At the San Francisco opening a dapper Italian mounted the conductor’s stand proud as Punch, not that he is a great conductor, or that anyone has ever called him one, but because he, Gaetano Merola, could rightfully claim credit for making San Francisco’s opera thrive. For his first season (1923) there was not even an adequate stage. Quick to gamble, he spent $20,000 fixing up the old Auditorium, began importing high-priced singers. When that first season ended Impresario Merola went to the hospital with a nervous breakdown. But San Franciscans had liked his performances, wanted more, formed an opera association with 2,500 founder-members who were never called upon for more than $50 or $100 apiece.

In 1932, as a part of its War Memorial program, San Francisco proudly opened the first U. S. civic opera house, equipped even to private quarters for the stage animals. Merola’s formula remained the same as at the old Auditorium. He kept the seasons short, used the local symphony orchestra and local choristers, sold out his performances with Big Names. The local backlog became stronger with the foundation of a ballet school with able Adolph Bolm, oldtime Diaghilev dancer, in charge. Last year, spending some $40,000 on scenery alone, the San Francisco Opera produced Wagner’s Ring cycle, headed the casts with Kirsten Flagstad and Lauritz Melchior, the two great Wagnerians from Manhattan’s Metropolitan Opera.

Before the season’s start in San Francisco some $200,000 from advance ticket sales had been taken in at the box office. Prices had been boosted to $6.60 top. Even so, there were still more customers than the opera house would hold. Again big names have done the trick, along with San Francisco’s opera fever. Flagstad and Melchior are returning with an established drawing power. Soprano Lotte Lehmann will be another headliner along with Rethberg, Martinelli, Lawrence Tibbett, Friedrich Schorr, Charles Kullmann, Emanuel List, all from the Metropolitan roster. Faced with the most strenuous job of the San Francisco season is the Wagnerian conductor, this year Hungarian Fritz Reiner, who proved himself top-notch at opera in the Philadelphia series two win ters ago and again last spring at London’s Covent Garden.

Choosing performers shrewdly, presenting many of them (e. g., Jeritza, Lily Pons, Flagstad) when they were hot spot-news has done much to keep up Merola’s prestige. But, though imported singers are headlined, home talent has its chance. Last autumn San Franciscans had reason to be proud of Josephine Tumminia (TIME, Dec. 9), a local barber’s daughter who will have leading coloratura roles again this season. After La Juive last week critics praised John Howell, a local baritone.

Chief experiment in San Francisco this year is the training of local understudies for every important part, thus laying the groundwork for a permanent opera school. One purpose is to have more thorough rehearsals, to get orchestra and chorus in better trim by the time the high-priced principals arrive. Another aim is to develop an all-local troupe which should soon be able to give seasons on its own.

Chicago had to start from scratch to build up an opera company after the Insull fiasco. Eager to be its impresario was Paul Longone, lavish with promises but short of funds. Last year’s performances were so ragged, so obviously thrown together that many an onlooker wondered how Longone could keep his job, how he could weather the charge that singers were buying their way into his company. Nevertheless, Longone is back this season as artistic director and general manager.

Chicagoans hope that the tide may be turned by their new opera president, short, grey-haired Jason Franklin Whitney, who worked his way from grocer boy in a Boston A. & P. store to president of Kraft-Phenix Cheese Corp. President Whitney believes that opera, like cheese, should be put on a business basis. His first move has been the creation of a permanent Revolving Fund for which he wants 1,000 contributors to give $100 each. By last week he had collected only $8,100. President Whitney was not discouraged. To help with routine expenses he is counting on a “Sponsor’s Fund,” asking business organizations to contribute for the sake of a program mention. All over Chicago last week women’s committees were peddling tickets.

Like his countryman Merola, Impresario Longone believes in big names, has signed up Lily Pons, Grace Moore, Rethberg, Melchior, Tito Schipa, Pinza, Martinelli, Lawrence Tibbett, John Charles Thomas, Edith Mason, Gertrud Wettergren, Marjorie Lawrence. An opera new to Chicago will be Jack and the Beanstalk, by Composer Louis Gruenberg (Emperor Jones) and Librettist John Erskine, first produced in Manhattan by the Juilliard School of Music (TIME, Nov. 30, 1931). A local debutante will be Betty Jayne Schultz, 15, billed as Betty Jaynes. She is blonde, blue-eyed, weighs less than 100 Ib. Impresario Longone calls her “my pet.”

Highest fees in Chicago this season will be paid to Grace Moore and Lawrence Tibbett, whose contracts call for $2,000 per performance. Greatest curiosity awaits the comeback of oldtime Amelita Galli-Curci who, after her goitre operation year ago, has had to learn to sing all over again.