Up Go Curtains

Long white gloves, high silk hats, flashlight photographers, society reporters, scribbling furtively on folds of paper, critics mooning in their aisle seats--these adjuncts of the advent of another season of grand opera were this week on view in the opera houses of Chicago and Manhattan. In Philadelphia they had appeared the week before.

Philadelphia. Last spring when the Philadelphia Civic Opera Company disbanded (TIME, April 21), there was given an obituary luncheon at which Conductor Alexander Smallens, now assistant leader of the Philadelphia Orchestra, called opera in Philadelphia a bataille des dames (battle of ladies). The time had come, he said, when every lady with a lot of money felt that she should have her own opera company. His reference was to three local troupes which had announced ambitious schedules at the beginning of the season: the Pennsylvania Grand Opera Company (president: Mrs. Houston Dunn) which succumbed with the stock-market crash in the fall; his own Philadelphia Civic Opera Company (president: Mrs. Henry M. Tracy) which had bravely survived six seasons; the Philadelphia Grand Opera Company (president: Mrs. Joseph Leidy).

Left alone in the field (save for the visits of Manhattan's Metropolitan) the Philadelphia Grand Opera Company opened its season with a sold-out house and a smart list of boxholders which included names like Curtis, Biddle, Lorimer and Pianist Josef Hofmann. Aida was the first opera with Italian Tenor Aroldo Lindi, Soprano Anne Roselle, Contralto Cyrena Van Gordon, Conductor Emil Mlynarski. Le Jongleur de Notre Dame followed last week with Mary Garden again casting her curious spell as the pale, questioning little juggler, Baritone Chief Caupolican (a South American Indian) as the kindly, understanding monk, able Eugene Goossens conducting. Both performances were consistently excellent. Minor parts were capably taken, the orchestra played smoothly, sets were effective, the lighting pleased. These essentials to good opera were in large measure the contribution of another Philadelphia woman, comparatively new to the operatic fray. The Philadelphia Grand Opera Company last year became affiliated with the Curtis Institute of Music, secured the backing of a $12,500,000 endowment fund and the interest of Mary Louise Curtis Bok, wife of the late editor Edward William Bok of Ladies' Home Journal, daughter of Publisher Cyrus Hermann Kotzschmar Curtis. Great pet of Mrs. Bok is the Curtis Institute given in memory of her mother. Its opera students needed an outlet for their new-trained talents. Philadelphia needed one really first-rate resident opera company. In collaboration with Mrs. Leidy, still active president, Mrs. William C. Hammer, artistic director, and William C. Hammer, business manager, Mrs. Bok now dictates the opera's policies, approves the repertoire and casts, signs the checks.

In Chicago. A part of opera's elaborate tradition is for the first-night piece to be familiar, preferably short, something which will not demand such concentration that the audience cannot look around at itself and make merry between curtains, Chicago's first night had a satisfactory brilliance this week. The acoustics were somewhat improved, and Samuel Insulls new rose & gold auditorium was a sumptuous background for Swifts, McCormicks, Ryersons, Fields, Drakes, Dicks and their neighbors. But the fantastic steel curtain (medley of trumpeters, poultry and a naked girl) went up on an opera never before heard in the U. S.: Ernest Moret's Lorenzaccio, based on the play of Alfred de Musset, with Baritone Vanni-Marcoux in the title role created by him ten years ago in Paris.

Lorenzaccio's Libretto proved to have greater distinction than its music. The central character is a henchman in the court of the Medici. He procures young girls for his cousin the duke, performs so many shameless services that he becomes corrupt himself, forgets his vow to free Florence from its tyrant. His mother finally stirs him with a story of having seen the ghost of his innocent youth. The tempo increases. Lorenzaccio's young aunt is sacrificed to the duke's lust. An old friend is victimized. But the greatest damage has been done to Lorenzaccio's own soul. To revenge himself, he finally kills his cousin--a scene made memorable last week by the superb, cumulative performance of Vanni-Marcoux.

Chicago will hear another premiere this season: Camille by Hamilton Forrest, onetime office boy in Samuel Insull's light, power and traction establishment. Camille was scheduled for performance last year, postponed because of insufficient time for rehearsals. Mary Garden will sing the title role. Other operas new to the repertoire and illustrative of Chicago's increased interest in German music will be Wagner's Die Meistersinger and Smetana's Bartered Bride. New sopranos are Lotte Lehmann, famed in Vienna; Emma Redell, a native of Baltimore trained in Europe; Maria Rajdl of Dresden. New Contraltos: Sonia Sharnova, a Chicagoan trained abroad; Jenny Tourel of Montreal. New tenors: Belgian Octave Dua already known in Chicago; Oscar Colcaire, naive of Lexington, Ky., onetime first violinist in the Cincinnati symphony; Paul Althouse, of Reading, Pa., for ten years with the Metropolitan; Frenchman Mario Laurence. New baritones: Jean Vieuille from the Paris Opera Comique, Rudolph Bockelmann from Hamburg, Hans Hermann Nissen from Munich, Eduard Habich from Berlin, Salvatore Baccaloni from Milan, John Charles Thomas. A new stage director, Dr. Otto Erhardt, has come from the Dresden State opera. Soprano Edith Mason, divorced wife of musical Director Giorgio Polacco, will not return.

In Manhattan. The Metropolitan's opening had little to distinguish it from many which have gone before. The opera was Aida, most serviceable of first-night choices. The cast was headed by Soprano Maria Miiller who was pretty, capable, unexciting; Tenor Giovanni Martinelli who sang loudly. The best performance was by Conductor Tullio Serafin who treated the great tunes tenderly, kept the whole moving at a swift and theatric pace.

Changes in the diamond horseshoe were few. It was whispered that old Mrs. Vanderbilt had done the incredible: rented her box for occasional performances. Absent was John North Willys, having transcended motor car making in Toledo to be U. S. ambassador to Poland while Mrs. Willys buys expensive art in Paris and their plump daughter travels about with her Argentine husband. Absent also was Edward Stephen Harkness, in Europe for the winter. But no one was so sincerely missed as Tom Bull, the courtly, white-haired gentleman who for 42 years took tickets at the front door, last summer died.

The Metropolitan has ten new singers Sopranos are Beatrice Belkin, lately of "Roxy's Gang"; Olga Didur, daughter of Polish Basso Adamo Didur; Parisian Coloratura Lily Pons; Myrna Sharlow, native of Jamestown, N. Dak. Mezzo sopranos: Faina Petrova of the Moscow Art Theater, Maria Ranzow of Vienna. Tenors: Georges Thill of the Paris Opera; Hans Clemens of Berlin. Baritones Claudio Frigerio, native of Paterson, N. J., trained abroad. Basso: Ivar Andresen, famed throughout Europe for his Wagner.

Operas new to the list are Deems Taylor's Peter Ibbetson (TIME, July 28), Felice Lattuada's Preziose Ridicole, Moussorgsky's unfinished Fair at Sorotchinsk, Franz von Suppe's Boccaccio, Wagner's The Flying Dutchman, Mascagni's Iris, Rossini's William Tell and Verdi's La Forza del Destino will be revived.

Again it is rumored that the nebulous new Metropolitan Opera House will be included in John Davison Rockefeller Jr.'s projected "Radio City" (TIME, July 7).

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