Summer Opera

Singers had returned from between-season holidays, stages and canopies had been rebuilt, guarantors were glancing over their bank accounts last week as summer opera began in these cities: Cincinnati, In the Zoological Garden there is a covered auditorium through whose open sides one may gaze over green lawns and gardens to a lake where swans and ducks swim. Sometimes during a pianissimo a lion's distant roar intrudes. Zoo men are careful to lock up the peacocks on opera nights. Here last week Ambroise Thomas' Mignon and Friedrich Smetana's Bartered Bride opened Cincinnati's season: eight weeks of standard grand opera, two of light opera (this year, Vincent Youman's & Herbert Stothart's Wild flower and Rudolf Friml's Firefly). Conductor is Isaac Van Grove. Of the able if not world-celebrated singers the most popular are Sopranos Myrna Sharlow and Josephine Lucchese. Contralto Marta Wittkowska, Tenor Forrest Lamont, Basso Herbert Gould. Last year the Zoo Opera was in need of patrons, felt that an endowment campaign would be necessary if it was to continue. One of its two great patrons died six years ago--Mrs. Mary Emery. The other was Mrs. Annie Sinton Taft, widow of Publisher Charles Phelps Taft of the Cincinnati Times-Star, who felt unable to carry the annual deficit alone. But after her death last February (TIME. Feb. 9) it was found that the Taft estate left provision for paying the Zoo deficit which now includes that of the Opera (formerly paid separately). Ravinia Park, Chicago's Louis Eckstein is perhaps the only melophile virtually to own an opera since mad King Ludwig II of Bavaria who in the middle of the last century sat many a time alone while his troupe sang for him in a great empty theatre. As president and chief guarantor of Ravinia Opera Mr. Eckstein is in his own way a mad king: he has paid for Ravinia some $1,000,000 in the last 20 years and said that as long as he lives there will be opera there. But his creation is no mere plaything: it has become today the world's finest summer opera. From all along the Lake Michigan shore to wooded Ravinia went one night last week the first audience of the ten-week season. Because one may listen for as low as $1.25 (outside the opera pavilion, but still near enough to hear perfectly), there came people in shirt sleeves as well as gentry in starched collars and decollete. First performance was a novelty: Gioa-chino Rossini's highly difficult William Tell which Chicago had not heard since 1919. Ravinia fans were glad to hear once more Elisabeth Rethberg as Mathilde, plump soprano daughter of Tyrant Gessler, and Giovanni Martinelli as her lover Arnold, heroic tenor patriot. Soprano Rethberg's bright Saxon face will soon be tanned dark beneath her pink & white makeup, for each year she takes a house near the lake, spends long days swimming. Soon other Ravinia favorites will appear in the season's two remaining novelties: Soprano Lucrezia Bori and Tenor Edward Johnson in Deems Taylor's Peter Ibbetson, and tall, dark French Soprano Yvonne Gall in La Basoche, Andre Messager's gay comic opera. Chicago believes that this season's deficit (last year's was $241,000) will be large as usual, and even larger for Patron Eckstein: other guarantors already feel pinched. But to all rumors of any change in policy Patron Eckstein replies: "Ravinia will never be permitted to pass into the hands of those who would devote it to cheap amusement." St. Louis. The "Muny Opera" of the Municipal Theatre Association of St. Louis opened its 13th season three weeks ago. Once devoted mainly to light opera-- Gilbert & Sullivan, Johann Strauss, Franz Lehar et al.--it has acquired a revolving stage, a number of onetime Shubert musical comedy singers, and last year a Shubert director, Milton I., nephew of Producers Lee & Jake (TIME, June 9. 1930). Its productions are now more in the Broadway manner than in that of the Savoy or the Strauss-Theater (see below). In the second week came 60,000 (a record) to Forest Park to the open air amphitheatre, to see The Street Singer with Queenie Smith starring. Next two productions are Music in May and Nina Rosa.

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