Music: Metropolitan’s 4yth

Seventeen years ago a slender, piquant figure dressed in 18th-Century furbelows stepped on the stage of Manhattan’s Metropolitan Opera House and began in an appealing but none-too-confident voice the music which Giacomo Puccini had written for his Manon Lescaut.* The debutante was Lucrezia Bori, a young Spaniard who by rights was Lucrezia Borgia, namesake and descendant of the Renaissance sorceress. The hero who lifted his voice high in praise for her was Enrico Caruso. On the stage they loved and she forsook him for the riches of another. They were reconciled and together banished on a convict ship for the Louisiana territory.

The story is old, maudlin, but it served again last week for the season’s opening performance at the Metropolitan. Again Lucrezia Bori was the misguided heroine. Round little Beniamino Gigli sang the Donna non vidi mai in a voice that compares to Caruso’s as Chianti to Napoleon brandy.

Seventeen years have dealt kindly with “the little Bori.” They have added few pounds to her figure, preserved her clear, limpid tones, built her a solid popularity. Hence, because she sang, the Metropolitan’s 47th First Night was for many a success. Others liked it because the music demanded little concentration. Intermissions were long enough in which to scrutinize the “Diamond Horseshoe,” to mark the majestic presence of the end Mrs. Vanderbilt, the absence of Mrs. Vincent Astor’s equine beauty. Dr. and Mrs. Herbert L. Satterlee entertained Explorer and Mrs. William Beebe. Otto Hermann Kahn spent the third act in the foyer, loudly discussing stocks in dizzying million figures (see p. 45).

Studying their programs, a few patrons noted a new name on the board of directors. The name was Ivy Lee, potent in its own right as that of a famed publicist but newsworthy in a Metropolitan program because among Mr. Lee’s clients is John Davison Rockefeller Jr. This change in the directorate seemed to bode action on the new opera house which Philanthropist Rockefeller wants for the centre of his proposed midtown Manhattan development (TIME, Feb. 4) as opposed to a more westerly uptown site planned by the Metropolitan’s seldom disputed dictator-patron, Otto Hermann Kahn.

Music critics were bored both by Manon Lescaut and the perennial talk of a new house. They considered the season’s prospects. Because the four new operas presented last year were failures, this year’s additions to the repertoire are older, better-tested.

They include: Puccini’s Fanciulla del West (The Girl of the Golden West) with Maria Jeritza, Giovanni Martinelli, Lawrence Tibbett; Mozart’s Don Giovanni with Ezio Pinza, Rosa Ponselle, Elisabeth Rethberg, Beniamino Gigli; Verdi’s Luisa Miller with Rosa Ponselle, Giocomo Lauri-Volpi, Guiseppe Dg Luca; Charpentter’s Louise with Lucrezia Bori; Rimsky-Kor-sakoff’s Sadko, Beethoven’s Fidelia and Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore with casts unannounced. Heading the list of newcomers is Josef Rosenstock, Viennese conductor, recently of Wiesbaden, come to succeed Artur Bodansky as leader of German opera. New singers are Sopranos Santa Biondo ((Italian-born, reared in New Haven), Elisabeth Ohms (Munich), Augusta Oltrabella (Italian); Mezzo-Sopranos Eleanor La Mance (Jacksonville), Gladys Swarthout (Kansas City); Tenors Antonin Trantoul (Paris Opera Comique), Edward Ransome (Manhattan) ; Baritone Alfredo Gandolfi and Basso Tancredi Pasero, both from Italy.

Absent this year will be Florence Easton, Marion Talley, Merle Alcock, Titta Ruffp, Guiseppe Reschiglian, Feodor Chaliapin and Conductor Guiseppe Bamboscheck.

* Four composers have written music for Abbe Prevost’s story. Fromental Halevy was first with a three-act ballet. Auber, Balfe and Puccini wrote operas called Manon Lescaut; Massenet’s is just Manon.