Aid

Efforts to aid a dozen thousand jobless musicians in Manhattan divide into two parts:

1) Musicians' Emergency Aid--for which Conductor Walter Damrosch has planned five stupendous concerts in Madison Square Garden with the world's No. 1 artists as soloists.*

2) The Musicians' Symphony, organized to give 200 capable orchestra men a chance to play again for their living, gave five concerts so successfully last winter that this autumn 20 were announced. The players get $15 a concert or $300 for their winter's work. Conductor Sandor Har-mati. who used to be with the Omaha Symphony, chooses and trains the men. (He claims that many of the players lost their jobs because they had lost their hair. The smoothest pate in the orchestra belongs to Alfred Friese, oldtime tympanist of the New York Philharmonic, whose pupil, young black-mopped Saul Goodman, now stands behind the kettledrums in Toscanini's orchestra.) Each concert has a different guest-conductor. Some of this season's guests: Gershwin. Reiner, Rodzinski, Stokowski. Stock, Harty.

Salome at the Metropolitan

What the late great John Pierpont Morgan banished from New York 25 years ago, the great golden-haired Maria Jeritza last week brought back--almost. In Europe the role of Salome in Richard Strauss's opera is one of the most celebrated of the many which Jeritza sings. For ten years she has wanted above all things to sing it in New York. But the Metropolitan Opera Company would not permit Jeritza or any other soprano to behave like Salome on its respectable stage, to shed seven veils one after the other in the notorious dance before King Herod or to grovel before a horrid head of St. John the Baptist. Once, 25 years ago, it attempted to give Salome and Dr. William Stephen Rainsford, the late Mr. Morgan's spiritual adviser,/- was so upset that a directors' meeting was called, the opera withdrawn from the repertoire because it was "objectionable and detrimental to the best interests of the Metropolitan."

Last week it was Jeritza's turn. She walked on to the Metropolitan stage and a great audience broke into terrific applause. She coaxed and beguiled the white-faced prophet in a voice expertly wanton. There was no scenery, no severed head on a platter but Jeritza sang-acted so vividly that people familiar with the Oscar Wilde story could easily imagine her crouching over the famed head, stroking its matted black hair, kissing the red lips.

As Jeritza bowed to the thunder of applause at the end. her smile might well have been tinged with cynical amusement. The Metropolitan, hard-pressed for cash, had dropped her from its roster last spring (TIME, May 30). When the Musicians' Symphony came begging her to sing for their jobless cause, she agreed--on one condition, that she should sing Salome. Agreed; and forthwith Jeritza persuaded her friend Composer Strauss to prepare a special concert version for her. to waive his big royalty so that she. along with Baritone Nelson Eddy (Jochanaan) and Conductor Fritz Reiner, could give last week's performance for the jobless. Two hundred of them, organized as the Musicians' Symphony (see col. 1), sat and played on the stage last week where the yawning cistern should have been to hold Jochanaan prisoner, where two dark cypress trees should have stood sinisterly against an Oriental sky. Jeritza and Jochanaan were conventionally clothed but if she had worn veils and he a hair- cloth tunic the performance could not have caused more excitement. The audience stayed long after the finish to cheer and cheer.

With Salome over and no Metropolitan engagements to follow, Jeritza again astounded the music world and gratified her irrepressible nature by going to Boston to sing Cavalleria Rusticana and Lohengrin with Fortune Gallo's itinerant San Carlo Opera Company.

Giant's Return

When Basso Feodor Chaliapin came to the U. S. in 1915, 40 newsmen encircled the greatest of singing-actors. Some one asked him about artistic conditions in Russia and Chaliapin at once began a 15-minute soliloquy which no one could understand. He clasped his beautiful hands over his heart, nourished them wildly in the air. Newsmen sat spellbound until he finished, then asked Manager Sol Hurok to translate. Manager Hurok shrugged his shoulders: "Russia? Oh, it's just about the same."

Last week, after three years' absence, Chaliapin returned to the U. S. to give nine concerts for a much lower fee than the $4,000 he used to ask.* Again newsmen asked about Russia. In halting English he told how the Soviets had taken away his lands, his money, had forbidden him to call himself any longer "The People's Singer." When he was dead, said he in broken voice, he would go back to Russia.

Now Chaliapin lives in France where last summer he made a cinema of Don Quixote in French and English. The picture was taken in mountainlands high above Nice and the natives are still talking about the rueful old man who rode about on a ribby white horse which he insisted on flitting each day. In his U. S. concerts Chaliapin will sing three songs written for his cinema by Jacques Ibert, pupil of Maurice Ravel.

* In addition to helping "starving musicians" the Emergency Aid has a fund from which it makes loans to famed artists who must maintain themselves in a semblance of style.

/- Dr. Rainsford, for 24 years pastor at St. George's Episcopal Church in Manhattan, always ate Monday-morning breakfasts with the elder Morgan.

* Three in Manhattan, two in Chicago, one in White Plains, Richmond, Hartford, Washington.

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