Stars v. Staging

During the winter opera season, Manhattan's Metropolitan, like most large opera houses, presents six or seven operas a week. Such a pace would probably be impossible to keep up in any other branch of the present-day theatre. But a well-trained operatic cast can put an opera through its tricks with very little rehearsal, often manages to do so with none at all. Schooled in a standard series of movements and gestures for each role, a good average opera singer can be fitted into a production at a moment's notice, like a spare part in a machine. With a good assortment of such spare parts an operatic director can assemble operas almost as rapidly as mechanics assemble automobiles. And the spare parts being more or less standard the world over, he can Jend particularly fine spare parts, famous Siegfrieds, Rigolettos or Toscas, to other opera houses, and borrow theirs in return.

This system of operatic production, known among operagoers as the ''star system," has its advantages. It simplifies and speeds up rehearsal, and allows the public to hear a great number and variety of fine singers. But it also has disadvantages. Under it, an operatic cast is seldom rehearsed as a unit. Result: Operatic acting and staging, as a rule, is slipshod, routine, uncoordinated.

Sensitive operagoers, who like to look as well as listen, have long bewailed opera's dramatic knocks and squeaks. Now and then zealous directors, and intrepid groups of operatic artists, have decided to do something about them. Most prominent of these groups in recent seasons have been England's Glyndebourne Opera, and the Salzburg Opera Guild.

Last week a similar group showed signs of sprouting in Ridgefield, Conn. There at his estate, "Dunrovin," wealthy Manhattan Attorney William Matheus Sullivan, long an admirer of England's Glyndebourne Festival, recently inaugurated the Dunrovin Festival which he hoped would develop along similar lines. Held in a remodeled coach house, the first Dunrovin Festival was a modest beginning. Only one session of opera was held, and that consisted merely of isolated scenes from three Mozart operas. But last week a capacity audience of some 350 agreed that Dunrovin's preliminary samples of custom-made opera were impressive.

The casts of the operatic scenes thus sampled contained no great names. For their productions, thick-spectacled Stage Director Felix Brentano and Conductor Fritz Mahler had chosen young, cooperative U. S. singers, devoid of upstage ideas. Thus equipped they rehearsed their operatic scenes as a conductor rehearses a symphony orchestra, shaped each musical phrase and each dramatic moment to fit, coordinated the action of the characters down to the 'slightest detail. By performance time they had done some 200 hours of solo, group and general rehearsing, far more than the most lavishly financed large-scale opera house could have afforded for a standard production.

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