Dauntless Impresario

To give two weeks of opera with singers imported from New York and Chicago, San Francisco last autumn opened the first municipal opera house in the U. S., one of the world's finest music theatres (TIME, Oct. 17). The chorus was composed of local amateurs. Orchestramen were borrowed from the San Francisco Symphony. The whole enterprise was characteristic of the audacity with which Impresario Gaetano Merola rounded up a San Francisco Opera Association ten years ago, collected membership dues running from $50 to $100 a head and proceeded to put on ambitious performances with rehearsals so sketchy as to be hair-raising.

Last week, with most U. S. cities regarding opera as a luxury to be forsworn and even New York worried about its Metropolitan, Impresario Merola announced still bigger things for San Francisco. Next autumn he will have a ten-week season. To prepare for it he opened an opera chorus school, the only one in the U. S. outside New York. He appointed Adolph Bolm who used to dance with the Diaghilev Ballet to start ballet classes. Said Signor Merola: "We are going to teach in our school everything that has to do with the lyric stage. . . . We have 5,000 operagoers here in San Francisco. They have 20,000 in New York--possibly 80,000 in the whole country. What is that in a population of 120,000,000? We are going to try to broaden this audience. . . ."

Leider's Ghost

For a bewildering moment it seemed as though a ventriloquist were taking part in the performance of Die Walkuere given last week at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House. Soprano Frida Leider, singing Bruennhilde, had sunk limply to the ground, crushed by Wotan's wrathy reprimand. Feebly, brokenly she started remonstrating with him. Then her voice died away. Another soprano voice, shriller, more biting than Madame Leider's, came out from the wings, sang until Madame Leider, regaining her composure, stood up and finished the performance so capably that most of the audience thought their ears had deceived them.

Madame Leider has been a big drawing-card since her debut as Isolde (TIME, Jan. 23).* The Metropolitan management was so fearful that news of last week's incident might hurt her reputation that it refused to admit her voice had failed her, that because she had felt dizzy and ill all through the performance Soprano Dorothee Manski had been stationed in the wings to ghost for her in just such an emergency.

* Neither interest in Soprano Leider nor Baritone Tibbett's success in Emperor Jones (TIME, Jan. 16) has been enough to keep the Metropolitan out of the financial plight in which it found itself last spring. Despite reduced salaries and a shortened season a $400,000 deficit had directors wondering last week whether to disband or attempt drastic reorganization. Most credible rumor: a twelve weeks' season in New York might be combined with visits to other cities which would be called upon for backing. Louis Eckstein, Ravinia's patron and newest of the Metropolitan's directors, would help arrange a Chicago engagement.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.