Music: Same Old Magic

“The greatest ovation in my 50 years of concert going,” said Mrs. William Randolph Hearst Sr. Said Jeritza: “A rabbit could have scared me away. I went to the post like a race horse which wears blinders. My heart was going boom, boom, boom!”

It had been nine years since Maria Jeritza had sung before a New York audience, but all the old magic was still there. The 3,000 who jampacked Carnegie Hall cheered as they never had before — and many of them had bravoed many an earlier Jeritza performance. As much as anything else, the audience applauded the 58-year-old soprano’s apparently in destructible beauty. In a silver-spangled white dress flown East by Hollywood’s Adrian, the golden-haired diva looked like the late Jean Harlow in her prime. And when she sang her program of high-powered arias in the grand manner, the greatest singer-actress of her day proved that she could still be almost as easy on the ear as on the eye.

Franz Josef’s Command. Jeritza, a Moravian, was born Mitzi Jedlicka, a name she glamorized after she became a Viennese prima donna. Emperor Franz Josef, who heard her at the Vienna Volksoper, commanded her to the Vienna Court Opera and gave her the Austrian Order of Knighthood, first class.* For ten years she was the operatic toast of Europe’s gayest capital. Her tall (5 ft. 7 in.) figure was as trim as a dressmaker’s model, and as muscular as a middleweight champion. For her combined vocal and physical prowess Puccini named her his “greatest Tosca,” Strauss his “greatest Salome.”

In 1921 Jeritza hit the Metropolitan Opera like a tidal wave. She sang the Vissi d’arte aria from Tosca lying flat on her face, the Seguidilla from Carmen flat on her back. In The Girl of the Golden West she rode a bronco on stage, and as Thai’s she once celebrated her conversion to Christianity with a record high-jump that landed her in the hospital. All this musical whoopla endeared Jeritza to her public, if not to her fellow artists. Snorted Soprano Lilli Lehmann: “If you’re a real artist you don’t have to lie down on your face to sing a big aria.”

J. P. Morgan’s Advice. In Salome, her most sensational European role, Jeritza literally cast off all seven veils. New Yorkers had to settle for less because the late John Pierpont Morgan, a Met backer, had Salome banished from the repertory at the advice of his pastor. This annoyed Jeritza into singing a concert version of the opera, which was at least wanton enough to give New Yorkers a vivid idea what they were missing.

She retired from the Met in 1932, later divorced her Austrian baron, Leopold von Popper, and married Hollywood Producer Winfield R. Sheehan (who died last July). During the war she quartered G.I.s in her castle near Salzburg, and turned her California ranch into a free convalescent home for wounded soldiers. Since a Carnegie Hall concert in 1937, she has sung mostly on the West Coast.

For her concert last week Jeritza picked a program which would have terrified most younger sopranos. After Wagner, Tchaikovsky and Mascagni, she writhed, bodily and vocally, through the bloody 2 25-minute finale from Salome. When ushers covered the stage with enough wreaths and bouquets to bury a Senator, Jeritza turned her back to the auditorium and sang Trees for the 300 persons seated on the stage. But she refused to sing Tosca, for which the customers yelled all evening. Said she: “Puccini made me vow never to sing it without lying on the floor. Can you imagine, brmph, brmph, Maria Jeritza goes flat on her nose at Carnegie Hall?”

* She still owns five steeds from the milk-white Lippizaner strain of horses, once bred exclusively for the Austrian court.