Music: Tibbett! Tibbett!

On cold winter nights, outside the Metropolitan Opera House, Manhattan, cabdrivers shuffle and swing their arms. It is dull for them. The people they have brought thither, wait to remove, are not even sports; they are music-lovers who give small tips, cold-eyed elegants in evening dress, or critics that ponder, as they read the meter, such terms as “a good performance, well sung,” “gala night,” “once more with a brilliant cast . . .” wishing to Heaven they could find a new phrase or change for a quarter. At regular intervals, the cabdrivers hear, from within, a prolonged rattling murmur which means that an act has ended and the nonsports are giving an imitation of enthusiasm. On a certain cold night last week, they heard that familiar sound ; it seemed curiously louder, nor did it die away. While they swapped butts, it grew, swelled into a steady, insistent, thunderous, stubborn volley, lasted for 13 minutes. The shuffling ones stared at one another in silent amaze. ”Cheest!” they said.

Inside, in the great warm hall, a shivering conductor shuffled his feet, besought silence; the lights of the entr’acte dimmed; still the great sound continued. In his dressing-room, a 28-ysar old U.S. baritone powdered his nose. Cast with the revered Scotti in the season’s revival of Verdi’s Falstaff, he had just ended the second act with the aria E sogno, in which he sets forth his suspicions that his spouse, Mistress Ford, is plotting infidelity with “that reverend vice, that grey iniquity, that father ruffian, that vanity in years,” Falstaff (Scotti). The heat of his singing had melted his makeup. He had taken numerous curtain calls with Scotti. People were still applauding? Doubtless they wanted the bronze-voiced Italian. He did not know that music lovers, cold-eyed elegants, smug critics alike were shouting through the applause, in the darkness of the house, “Tibbett! Tibbett!”

There was a scuffle of feet outside the dressing-room door. A call boy—”Mr. Gatti wants you. Immediately.” Young Tibbett grabbed his robe. Gatti-Casazza, famed director of the Metropolitan, smilingly pushed him toward the stage. There, alone, he took his curtain call, bowed again and again. Then the opera was permitted to proceed.

It is 15 years since Falstaff was played at the Metropolitan. Verdi wrote it when he was 80 and full of frolic. He had composed so much that writing music was no longer an effort, and frequently as he wrote, he said, he was convulsed with laughter. The score is easy, melodious, lighthearted, reminiscent of Wagner iu mannerism rather than in poetry. Miss Bori was Mistress Ford; Tenor Gigli, Master Fenton; Mme. Alda, Nannette. All did well, But the critics, as they hailed their frost-bitten taxi-men and drove home, were replacing their familiar bromides with other phrases: “A scene quite without precedent” (The New York Times) ; “A relatively obscure singer who walked away with the chief honors” (The New York Herald-Tribune) ; “An eager young man, who made music history when the brilliant audience lost control” (The New York World).

At last a U. S. singer had brought down the Metropolitan.