Philadelphia Opera

The Philadelphia Civic Opera Company does little boasting and yet it attracts attention by reason of achievement. To be sure it is not a large organization and its support comes from public funds; its singers are not of international reputation and the players in the pit are borrowed from the Philadelphia Orchestra. But it has Alexander Smallens for conductor, W. Attmore Robinson for artistic director, men who have refused to be bound by a Verdi-Puccini repertoire. Last year they gave the U. S. premieres of De Falla's El Amor Brujo, of Erich Korngold's Der Ring des Polykrates and critics all over the country pricked up their ears.

Last week two premieres were announced for a double bill. Die Maien- konigen was the curtain-raiser, a pastoral meringue, mixed & baked, it is said, by no less a man than Gluck for the birthday palate of Maria Theresa. Then came Richard Strauss's Feuersnot.

In the opera houses of Europe, Feuersnot is an old story. Strauss finished it in 1901 (it antedates Salome, Elektra, Der Rosenkavalier, his three operas known in the U. S.) when the afterglow of the Mightier Richard still blinded the young composers of the day, sending tunes from Tristan and Siegfried watered and warped into a thousand insignificant attempts. But Strauss even then could stand alone. He quoted, to be sure, from Rheingold but he quoted deliberately, when it suited him to have Wagner pop out of the back-ground of his libretto as the great forerunner of himself--the great Strauss. The story, as it was played, followed an old Dutch legend of a mid-summer festival with bonfires & a burgomaster's daughter & a bookish boy too long boxed up. Philadelphia critics, as well as critics who had taken the pilgrimage from other cities, regretted that there was no consistent loveliness in the score, that Soprano Helen Stanley & Baritone Marcel Salzinger had had to sing alternate measures of beauty and chaff. But the whole they found skillful stimulating, worthy of the Strauss of the tone-poems and the songs far worthier of production than many of the so-called novelties that have found their way into the repertoire of the Metropolitan and the Chicago companies the past few seasons.