Music: Buckeye Opera

Cleveland music-lovers and city-boosters looked into the sky one afternoon last week for a portent. Suddenly from the Union Terminal Tower a great white banner with a diagonal red stripe was flung to the breeze. The weather that evening would be fine. The Opera was on!

Behind the banner were months of elaborate and painstaking organization which were to give the city its first outdoor opera. It would not be the Metropolitan troupe which Senator Robert Johns Bulkley brings to the city every year through his Northern Ohio Opera Association, but a gigantic al fresco show, home-produced in the month-old Municipal Stadium. Beneficiary of the performance was the Cleveland Press’s milk fund. Purpose was to entertain those of the citizenry who like music and those who like spectacles. A further purpose was to illuminate iron-mongering Cleveland’s place on the nation’s cultural map.

Plans were drawn for the largest opera stage ever constructed: 300 ft. by 125 ft. It was built in three tiers out of lumber left over from the Schmeling-Stribling prize fight which baptized the Stadium (TIME, July 13). Associate stage director, who helped design with simple grandeur the sets used on the six nights, was Laurence Higgins, a 25-year-old native son. Directing his work with the Stadium Grand Opera Co. was Ernst Lert, longtime stage director at La Scala in Milan, dropped from the Metropolitan this year after two seasons. A facile lighting technician, Lert worked for sweeping effects in great patches of contrasted colors. His sister-in-law is Vicki Baum, playwright of famed Grand Hotel.

Since the end of May, Cleveland had been canvassed for a native chorus and ballet. Rita De Leporte, the Metropolitan’s première danseuse, whipped together an able troupe of 100. Giacomo Spadoni, assistant conductor and choral master of the Chicago Civic and Ravinia opera companies, selected 300 voices. For Aïda was provided a special Negro chorus led by a colored preacher. For Smetana’s The Bartered Bride—”Czech national opera”—was provided the Cleveland United Czech Singing Society. A group of Welshmen were to sing specially in Die Meistersinger.

In charge of the whole production was Director Guy Golterman, the man who founded the St. Louis Municipal Open Air Theatre with a week of Aïda in 1917. At Cleveland he planned to give three Aïdas. Sandwiched in between were three “prize packages” from La Gioconda, Carmen, Die Meistersinger, The Bartered Bride and Cavalleria Rusticana. Director Golterman gathered a goodly company of principals: Soprano Alida Vane (La Scala); Soprano Anne Roselle (Metropolitan) ; Contraltos Coe Glade and Constance Eberhart (Chicago); Tenor Paul Althouse (Metropolitan); Pasquale Amato, oldtime Metropolitan Baritone trying for a comeback; Contralto Dreda Aves (Metropolitan) for whom a horticulturist in her hometown of Norwalk, Ohio, has named a giant yellow snapdragon.

While hiring his talent in Manhattan, Director Golterman came across the most newsworthy member of his troupe—Helen Gahagan, who played the part of the hard-to-awaken operactress in David Belasco’s last production, Tonight or Never and married Melvyn Douglas, her leading man (TIME, April 12). On the evening her play closed she met Director Golterman, expressed a wish to make her U. S. début in his company. In 15 min. a contract was drawn up and she announced: “I am happy to make my American début in Ohio because my grandmother and her people came from the Buckeye State.”

Svelte, brunette, born at Boonton, N. J. in 1900, Helen Gahagan took up singing after theatrical successes in Young Woodley and Diplomacy. In Germany and Czechoslovakia she sang in Tosca and the part of free-&-easy Santuzza in Cavalleria Rusticana, which was her role the fifth night in Cleveland last week.

First-night audiences had already been bowled over by the sheer bulk of the production. In the pit was Conductor Cesare Sodero (formerly with La Scala, now opera conductor of NBC) surrounded by an orchestra of 90 men, most of them from the Cleveland Orchestra. Three operators regulated a $25,000 amplification system which used horns six ft. long.* Anne Roselle was Aïda. Paul Althouse, Rhadames, Pasquale Amato was Amonasro. Critics credited them with “signal ability . . . abundant breadth and vigor . . . impressive operatic authority.”

The crashing climax of Director Golterman’s Aïda came with the triumph of the Egyptian king at the Act II finale. Eight hundred voices (including the Aframerican chorus) filled the wide night air, 100 dancing girls disported before the monarch and on the lawn in front of the mammoth stage were massed Egyptians on real camels† and a troop of the Cleveland mounted Police disguised as Bedouins.

The second night it rained, but the third night Governor George White—escorted by the Cleveland Grays—attended. Throughout the week Cleveland was in raptures. Eighteen thousand spectators attended almost every night, the “largest number of spectators ever to view open-air opera.”

The glory of Egypt in Ohio was again unfolded on the last evening. In the closing moments, when the tense lovers were being buried alive, there came a hush. An impassive moon shone down and from not far away came a gentle hooting. Industrial Cleveland could take its culture in huge doses, but still there remained the reminding murmur of nearby switch engines, the low moan of homing ore boats.

*Because people absorb sound, four times more amplification was needed when the stadium was full (20,000 capacity) than when it was empty. †The same camels were used last month in Cleveland for the Shriners’ Convention.