Voice Without "Potato"

Amelita Galli-Curci needed no advertising after 1916 when she made a memorable debut with the Chicago Opera Company. In the years that followed, her singing rang through most of the civilized world, earned her the rating of the world's greatest coloratura soprano. She sometimes sang a little off pitch and she was not a good actress but her beautifully pure, light voice, her vitality and the lean, aquiline face of an Italian aristocrat got her $4,500 for a single concert. For a comparatively small salary she stayed with Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera Company until 1930.

By this time, a small goitre, which she called her "potato," had made its appearance on her throat, severely cutting down her respiration. However, she started on a European tour, reduced her price to $2,200. She had her usual successes in London and Prague but in Budapest one night an audience astonished and dismayed her by booing and catcalling her Violetta in La Traviata. To newshawks she presently explained that she had caught a cold, announced that she could not buck Europe s prejudice against her high prices, canceled the rest of her tour. Since then, indefatigably carrying on her world concert tours, the great Galli-Curci had all but dropped out of the headlines until last fortnight when she slipped into Chicago's Henrotin Hospital and had her "potato" carved out of her throat (TIME, Aug. 19).

Last week Galli-Curci sang exercises in bed, gaily emitted a high C. She gladly gave the Associated Press her own written account of the goitre operation, broadly suggesting that the potato-less Galli-Curci voice will be bigger & better than ever. Excerpts:

"My voice is free again, unbridled after years of struggle with the potato. The result of my operation is just short of marvelous. Even now. when I am not fully recovered. I need hardly open my mouth to obtain the pure tones difficult when the potato was in my throat. . . . My voice is like a young colt; I will have to restrain it....

"What I will do first, what I will sing first when I am fully recovered I am not sure. I love concert work. . . . But opera was my first love, and I hope that soon the public will respond to it as music lovers did some years ago. . . ."

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