Gatti's Good-by

When Giulio Gatti-Casazza returns to Manhattan from his summers in Italy, the long-established routine has been for him to summon musical reporters and inform them of the singers he has engaged, the operas he intends to produce the coming season. The picture in his dark, musty office has always been the same: Gatti settling his great bulk in a swivel chair, fumbling for the ribbon which holds his pince-nez, reading his announcement aloud in slow, painstaking English. When questions were asked, he would stroke his beard, answer warily or not at all. A grave "good afternoon" regularly closed each such session with the Press. Last week musical reporters were still awaiting their annual summons when Giulio Gatti-Casazza suddenly announced that this season would be his last as impresario of the Metropolitan Opera Company.

With his resignation Gatti made public the correspondence between himself and Board Chairman Paul Drennan Cravath. Mr. Cravath's letters were suitably regretful: "I find it difficult to adjust myself to the thought of the Metropolitan without you in charge. . . ." Sphinxian Gatti was characteristically formal: "This decision is taken in consideration of my rather mature age , and of the continued and exhausting hardships of a long directorial career. . . ."

Gatti could, if he would, have been eloquent on the subject of his career. He could have told how he and his friend Arturo Toscanini arrived at the Metropolitan 26 years ago, how between them they had given artistic and financial authority to a company rich with singers, poor in discipline. Gatti could have boasted rightfully of his business prowess. In the Opera's palmy days had he not made performances pay for themselves in addition to providing a $1,000,000 nest egg? He could have recalled many historic scenes: plump little Marcella Sembrich making her operatic farewell; Enrico Caruso singing his last, as the bearded Jew in Halevy's La Juive; Geraldine Farrar appearing in Die Koenigskinder with a flock of real, live geese (TIME, Nov. 12); Maria Jeritza giving her first breath-taking Tosca; Marion Talley making her debut with mounted police handling the sidewalk crowds outside the dingy opera house. . . .

But Gatti was in no mood for such reminiscences last week. His pride was hurt. The $1,000,000 surplus had been eaten by Depression. The Metropolitan directors, under Chairman Cravath, had twice voted to beg publicly for money. Their appeals had brought forth life-saving cash but also sharp criticism of Gatti's administration: he was oldfashioned; he was a reactionary, a slave to routine; he was unwilling to experiment with new ideas for scenery and staging.

Ever since the tin-cup campaigns reorganization at the Metropolitan has seemed inevitable. Gatti's resignation, long rumored (TIME, Nov. 28, 1932, et seq.), merely focused in the headlines the necessity for change. When the directors choose to elect Gatti's successor, Chairman Cravath and his associates have a long list of applicants to consider.

Before such a choice is made, however, the practicability of a merger of the New York Philharmonic-Symphony and the Metropolitan Opera will be thoroughly weighed. All through Depression the music-wise in Manhattan have felt that both the Metropolitan and the Philharmonic were attempting too frequent performances for their own artistic and commercial good, that wealthy social somebodies would soon tire of signing "musical" checks. A merger would undoubtedly lengthen the Metropolitan season but instead of eight performances a week the plan is to give four, while the Philharmonic would cut its four concerts to two. Practically it is believed that Metropolitan musicians and stagehands would accept smaller weekly salaries for the sake of longer engagements, that the quality of the Metropolitan performances would profit greatly by having the Philharmonic orchestramen in the pit with conductors like Otto Klemperer, Bruno Walter and Arturo Toscanini to lead them.

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