San Francisco Memorial

(See front cover*) When autumn comes, lights are lit at night in the opera houses and orchestra halls of the land. Top hats and ermine come out of the closets of the wealthy, precious tickets are clutched firmly by the poor but cultured, and Music returns to its own in the U. S. Last week the season began on a national scale. In Boston well-groomed Sergei Koussevitzky, in Manhattan electric Arturo Toscanini, in Philadelphia blond-mopped Leopold Stokowski raised their batons over the country's leading orchestras. As usual, and contrary to advance notices which promised conventional music for the troublous times (TIME, Sept. 12), Stokowski produced the weirdest sounds. Four-fifths of his first audience walked out early when he not only played Werner Josten's Jungle but repeated it.

But the openings in Boston. Manhattan and Philadelphia were not the prime news of this new season. On the Pacific Coast was the event that marked the year.

The Los Angeles opera, having announced a bye, changed its mind and gave five performances last week, unwilling to be completely eclipsed by what was to happen this week in rival San Francisco. San Francisco was opening a new world-ranking opera house, and presenting (at $3.500 per night) the Metropolitan's new and brilliant little star, Lily Pons.

San Francisco's music has lately been in a comparatively poverty-stricken state.

Its orchestra, which suffers in comparison with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, has given many a noteworthy concert, but for years it was a bone of contention between wealthy Jews who liked and supported hulking Conductor Alfred Hertz, and the Bohemian Club element who have never quite forgiven Hertz for displacing their convivial clubmember, Henry Hadley.

Conductor Hertz was ousted two years ago. Russian Issai Dobrowen and British Basil Cameron imported. But the orchestra has continued to drift nearer & nearer the rocks through lack of general support.

San Francisco's opera has had a more glorious, if more sporadic past. In the gold-rush days San Franciscans favored the vivid, glamorous music of the theatre.

When opera companies drifted up from South America the city would turn out full force, throw bags of gold to the performers. The old Tivoli Opera House started its career in 1875. Beer flavored the performances there but, alternating light opera and grand, the house managed to keep open all year round--an achievement never equaled in the U. S. The Metropolitan Opera visited San Francisco three times--with Calve, Melba, Eames, Schumann-Heink, Fremstad, Gadski, Sembrich. Caruso, the de Reszkes. Early one morning during the third visit the earth started rumbling and quaking, knocked the entire company out of bed, frightened Enrico Caruso so badly that even though he was offered $25,000 he would not go back to 'Frisco.

At the Tivoli in 1904, chunky little Luisa Tetrazzini made her U. S. debut and San Francisco thrilled with the pride of discovering her. But mention Tetrazzini to San Franciscans today and they will talk mostly of Christmas Eve, 1910, when she sang for the poor at Lotta's-Fountain, the ugly traffic impediment at Kearney & Market Streets, given by the late Lotta Crabtree who did her first trouping in California. More than 100,000 people heard Tetrazzini do her trills and cadenzas that night, without benefit of modern amplifiers.

Since the War, San Francisco's opera, like Los Angeles', has been limited to a brief autumn season when artists from Chicago and Manhattan have gone out, sung with a local orchestra, local choristers. San Francisco's opera has had healthy, general support. Instead of a Samuel Insull or Mrs. Bok it has had 2.500 member-backers who have contributed from $50 to $100 apiece. Until last year it paid for itself. And this year, when Chicago's and Philadelphia's opera houses are dark, the lights will go on in a house made possible by all the people of San Francisco.

In 1918 the city was in a mood to build a War Memorial for which it proceeded to raise $2,000,000 by popular subscription. There was talk then of building an opera house to relieve the necessity of using Dreamland, the local prize fight hall, or the barnlike Civic Auditorium where the Democratic National Convention was held in 1920. Veterans felt that any War Memorial should be specially useful to them. There were years of dispute until Richard Montgomery Tobin, onetime (1923-29) Minister to The Netherlands took command. As a veteran and a music- enthusiast he was able to reconcile both factions. A $4.000,000 bond issue was floated, one-third of which the city subscribed. Architect Arthur Brown Jr. with Albert Lansburgh collaborating designed twin buildings (one for veterans' organizations, one for opera). They are dignified granite and terra cotta structures which harmonize with the new City Hall at the centre of the civic group which includes the State Building, the Auditorium and the Public Library. For its maintenance the opera house was voted an additional annual public grant of $65.000 which the city hopes to get back in rent from the Opera Association, the Symphony and kindred organizations.

The new Opera House, to be dedicated this week, is easily the most attractive and practical building of its kind in the U. S. The stage has every convenience-- an elaborate arrangement of bridges and traps permitting any part of the floor to be lowered or raised, an imported electrical cloud machine, a thunder machine, a wind machine. The seating arrangement will please boxholders far better than that which Samuel Insull devised for Chicago.

Chicago's socialites dislike the way their boxes are fixed like cinema loges in an almost straight line at the back of the theatre. The San Francisco house has a golden fan instead of a golden horseshoe, illuminated by a great star in the ceiling.

At the opening this week the Wallace Mck.

Alexanders will be able to watch the Prentis Cobb Hales, Camerons can keep their eyes on Ehrmans, Robert Watt Millers and Tubbses, Crockers on Gianninis, Fleishhackers on Zellerbachs. In the basement there is a hospital-room equipped for minor operations, another room which stage animals can have all to themselves.

San Francisco's only complaint last week was that thousands could not get seats for any of the dozen performances.

The auditorium is built on the European plan. It seats 3,285, one-third again as many as the Paris Opera, but 200 less than the Chicago house, 500 less than the Metropolitan. Scalpers are getting $100 a pair for tickets, a fact which greatly delights Impresario Gaetano Merola, for last spring his committee was hesitant about putting on the 1932 season. After nine years' experience with Merola they should have known better than to hesitate.

Merola is no Toscanini but he is probably the world's nerviest, luckiest conductor. Some years ago he gave open-air opera at Stanford Stadium, lost his Italian backers a tidy sum. But at just the right time each evening a full moon rose.

People who attended the performances were so pleased that they gladly donated when, later, he organized a chorus, went around town to banquets and meetings drumming up enthusiasm for a permanent opera organization. He spent $20,000 first thing, fixing up the old Auditorium. He imported high-priced singers. At the end of his first season (1923) he went to the hospital with a nervous breakdown. He had put on performances with the sketchiest possible rehearsals. He does the same thing now but he lets the rest of his staff worry. With subscribers back of him, he concentrates on picking his singers.*This year Merola has allotted his opening night to Soprano Claudia Muzio who can be depended upon for a sure-fire performance of Tosca. Then will come the night which he hopes to make as memorable as the Christmas Eve when Tetrazzini trilled at Lotta's Fountain. Lily Pons will make her San Francisco debut, sing in Lucia di Lammermoor, the opera which introduced her to Manhattan one blizzardy January afternoon two winters ago.

That afternoon an apathetic crowd was prepared.to be bored by the debut of an unknown in a trite, old-fashioned opera. Until she reached the mad scene only her youthful charm impressed. Then she swept the house out of itself. She sang her high F, managed chromatics and staccati with incredible ease. The audience made her take 16 curtain calls.

That night Lily Pons hung opposite her bed one of the cheap paper strips on which the Metropolitan advertises its performances. To her, more than to anyone else, so great a success seemed fabulous. Only a few months before she had been singing with a second-rate opera company in Montpellier on the Riviera, wondering whether to follow the advice of Maria Gay, an oldtime Carmen who had stopped at the opera house and urged her to go to Manhattan so that Giulio Gatti-Casazza could hear her.

That first Metropolitan performance made people want to know all about unknown Lily Pons. Her father was an automobile pioneer who drove a Sizaire-Naudin car from Paris to Pekin, got lost in the Urals, starved in Tibet and had to be towed the latter part of his journey. Lily grew up in Paris where her mother did millinery. She studied piano at the Paris Conservatoire but when, during the War, she attempted to play Bach and Debussy for soldiers she usually ended by singing.

In a brief musical comedy interlude she married August Mesritz, an elderly Dutch retired lawyer and publisher. Husband Mesritz persuaded his young wife to study singing. Every day for three years he took her to the studio of Teacher Alberto de Gorostiaga (who comes in now for 5^ of all her earnings). No one cared then (least of all Paris where she has never sung) that she ate chicken sandwiches for breakfast, liked yellow dresses, hated champagne, elevators, telephones. Such things became matters of acute interest to New Yorkers, who are particularly pleased with the fact that Pons is French. They think it is delightful that she will buy 5-c- apples and eat them on the street, that she really prefers department store clothes to those she could get in Paris.

The naive Pbns ways and docile disposition mislead some people. She is smart. She works hard on her music although her natural musical instinct is phenomenally sound. It did not take her long to learn that a prima donna who travels with pets gets photographed: she brought a baby jaguar back from her triumphal visit to Buenos Aires this summer. She also has learned that divorce rumors after sudden success are bad publicity. Separated from her husband, she says: "Divorce? Oh. No! No! No!"

Lily Pons insists that she will sing only ten years, then retire. With French frugality she should be able to. But even smart prima donnas find it hard to stop while they are successful. At 61 last year, Luisa Tetrazzini was singing in U. S. cinemansions.

*Painting by Artist J. Campbell Phillips of Manhattan. *In addition to Pons, this year's stars include Sopranos Claudia Muzio, Maria Mueller, Queena Mario; Contralto Kathryn Meisle; Tenors Dino Borgioli, Francesco Merli, Mario Chamlee; Baritones Richard Bonelli, Friedrich Schorr, Alfredo Gandolfi; Basso Ezia Pinza.

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