Music: Comic Relief

Antics too trite to be really funny seemed funny last week at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Opera House. A beggar walked on stage leading a dog with a BLIND sign around its neck and the audience guffawed when it was told that the dog was blind, not the master. Little George Meader caused a big laugh when he appeared made up as the Mad Hatter, tripped over a carpet bag, played a serenade on a red silk umbrella. Tenor Walther Kirchhoff was no funnier than usual but the audience snickered when he came out carrying a sun flower. Occasional exclamations escaped in English: “Sure!”, “Sonny Boy!”, “Whoopee!”

The tunes which accompanied these goings-on were pleasant but not particularly distinguished. Composer Franz von Suppe (Poet and Peasant Overture) wrote them for Boccaccio, a cluttered comic piece based on the Italian storyteller’s love for Fiammetta, bastard daughter of the Duke of Tuscany. But the Metropolitan audience was unusually enthusiastic, broke its rule, stayed almost to a dowager until the final curtain. Soprano Maria Jeritza (Boccaccio) was the magnet for most. She was radiantly fair, displayed calves beyond the dreams of most opera singers. One waltz, compiled by Conductor Artur Bodanzky from Suppe themes, she sang with such lilt that it stopped the show, set many to wishing that she would do in the U. S. some of the light-opera roles for which she is famed in Vienna, that the Metropolitan would unbend more often.