Coronation Comedown

Except for notoriously bad equipment, nothing had threatened the prospects of Covent Garden's Coronation operas (TIME, May 3). Director Sir Thomas Beecham had engaged such guest conductors as Wilhelm Furtwaengler, John Barbirolli, Francesco Salfi, Artur Rodzinski, Fritz Reiner. Eugene Goossens of the Cincinnati Symphony had been hired to conduct the world premiere of Don Juan de Manara, a bloodthirsty opera differing widely from Mozart's Don Giovanni, which he had composed for the late Arnold Bennett's libretto. He had succeeded in combining with his own company the Paris Grand Opera and Opera-Comique. Colonel de Basil's Ballet Russe had been billed to dance. Metropolitan Opera participants included Kirsten Flagstad, Gina Cigna, Kerstin Thorborg, Lauritz Melchior, Lawrence Tibbett, Giovanni Martinelli, John Brownlee. The Coronation season was to last eleven weeks instead of the usual six. Yet in London last week curtains dropped on an opera season which, promising to be the best in years, had turned out to be the worst.

Aside from a surefire Ring, and sterling individual performances, critics found little to commend. They considered Otello "dull," "flat," "not up to the usual standard of Covent Garden." In the Sunday Times Ernest Newman pronounced Don Pasquale "an exasperation and a pain from first to last." When critics on the Evening News, the Manchester Guardian, the Star and the News Chronicle came out with adverse criticism of Cesare Formichi's singing in Falstaff, Covent Garden stopped sending them tickets. Even the Times was moved to protest the "disarrangement" of Orphee and Prince Igor, in which the Ballet Russe did not supplement the singers but stole the show from them. While Sir Thomas Beecham quietly prepared to leave London on a vacation, people gossiped that he would not renew his Covent Garden contract next year. But only cheers awaited Vice Chairman Frank Pick of the London Passenger Transport Board, who wrote to the Times:

"The time has come to protest against scenery and production which are an insult alike to the eye and to the intelligence and which only help to make ridiculous the action of the opera. How may the artistic conscience of the authorities of Covent Garden be stirred?"

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