Music: At the Met

The track looked fast, the card promising, when opera fans, as special a tribe as race-track railbirds, gathered for the opening of the big-time season, at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Opera.

Opening. First night, the glowing gold curtain went up as usual on the audience which is the last glittering show in western civilization. In the Diamond Horseshoe, niftiest railbirds were Mrs. George Washington Kavanaugh, Lady Decies and Mrs. Leonora Warner (see cut). No one paid much attention to the opera, which was one of the lasting achievements of western civilization—the tender, comic Marriage of Figaro by Wolfgang Amadeus

Mozart, who died 150 years ago this week.

Conductors are as important as jockeys, and Bruno Walter, a successful guest conductor last season, led a sweetly stirring performance of Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice. Another great opera man. Sir Thomas Beecham, will be in the saddle for Carmen, Le Coq d’Or and Bach’s Phoebus and Pan. The Met had planned to shake up its two Italian veterans, Gennaro Papi and Ettore Panizza, giving to each some operas that the other had been leading. But just before last week’s Traviata, Signor Papi dropped dead of heart disease. Panizza took his place.

Tenors the Met has had aplenty, but most are strictly platers. This year it had to scratch two: Jussi Bjoerling (because he could not get out of his native Sweden); Tito Schipa (because he returned to his native Italy at the bidding of Count Ciano). New tenors were Kurt Baum, a personable Czech (onetime heavyweight boxing champion of Prague) who showed good form in a bit in Der Rosenkavalier, and Jan Peerce, a veteran of Radio City Music Hall, who showed even more in his debut as the hero of Traviata.

Short, dark Tenor Peerce’s mother wanted him to study medicine, but he learned the fiddle, played and sang with Manhattan dance bands, was launched in the Music Hall by the late Samuel A. (“Roxy”) Rothafel. When Peerce protested that he was too short and “funny looking” for the stage, Roxy replied: “You’re the tallest man in the world! You’re the handsomest man in the world! All you have to do is believe that.”

New fans at the Met were soldiers and sailors who got free tickets—50 or so a night, barring sellouts—by presenting certificates from the New York City Defense Recreation Committee. For some, however, one act of opera was enough.