Music: Harvest

50X3,000=150,000

So did figures play around in the pate of Marion Talley last week as she sped from Buffalo, N. Y., to Quincy, Ill. Fifty (that stood for the number of concerts scheduled),* by $3,000 (the approximate fee) multiply and subtract expenses. . . . The figuring held no terrors for her. She had excelled in arithmetic back home in the Kansas City school—in arithmetic, deportment and singing. Singing had made her a Metropolitan Opera star at 19. Arithmetic broadened into a good business sense which enables her to make her own contracts to her own good advantage. In deportment there has been little change.

Lack of change, probably more than any single factor, has spoiled Marion Talley for Manhattan’s most musical. When she made her debut at the Metropolitan in 1926, it was in the full glare of blazing publicity. Critics realized that the fuss was none of her making, that presses all over the U. S. were starved at the time for a good human interest story. They were for the most part kind. She had a pleasant voice. She might some day become an artist. And for three years they waited.

The voice has in some ways improved. She sang well as the mechanical bird in Stravinsky’s Le Rossignol. She piped prettily through Mignon. But her big music has been little, the real art of singing something she has never seemed to grasp.

“Talley trouble,” meanwhile, has come to mean lack of temperament. The life she leads has been as much to blame. In it there have been vocal gymnastics, new languages for new operas, right living. There have been few books, few friends, no beaus. There have been the rigid standards bred by the First Christian Church of Kansas City, a public to be a little suspicious of, and a handful of haughty prima donna ways which have not helped her popularity.

Last spring the rumor circulated that the Metropolitan was through with her. The rumor was false. She will give a few performances in January but first there will be a concert tour through Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Mississippi, Wisconsin, Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma. In February she begins again in Lancaster, Pa., goes through the South as far as Havana. It took just one hysterical evening in Manhattan to make the Talley name. The harvest, reaped largely on the road, mounts well toward the million mark.

* The first was in Burlington, Vt., then Buffalo, N. Y., Ames, Iowa, Cedar Falls, Iowa, etc.