Three Kings

Tall, grey, bony Italo Montemezzi, 65-year-old Italian composer, is a one-good-opera man.* Montemezzi's opera, written in 1913, is L'Amore del Tre Re (The Love of Three Kings). It is a chronicle of ancient tabloid-headline love: a king's wife and a handsome lover; a compassionate husband; a wise, blind, bearded oldster poking about in the background. It is old stuff to sophisticated opera fans, but Montemezzi's surging, glowing score is as Italian as ravioli, and one of the best of its kind since Verdi. Last week Composer Montemezzi made L'Amore del Tre Re an event by dishing it up, with his own baton, at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera.

Goldilocked Soprano Grace Moore, who has announced that she will retire after the war, "to help with the reconstruction work that must follow," sang Fiora, the ove of two of the three kings. Chicago had heard her in the part, but for her, the Met and Montemezzi, it was a belated reunion, [n 1923, when Soprano Moore was in the Music Box Revue, Montemezzi coached her for a Metropolitan audition, and she vowed that some day she would sing in his opera. Well she sang it, but she postured in stained-glass attitudes, walked in the gait of a woman trying out an unfamiliar wooden leg. Singing at her lover from a parapet, Soprano Moore pounded the scenery like a Bronx housewife pounding a counter, raised a cloud of dust that cruelly dispelled the mood of the moment. Obviously the Metropolitan needed not only more conductors like Guest Montemezzi, but also a good duster-wielding housekeeper.

At the University of Minnesota, addicts of Beat Me Daddy Eight to a Bar, Scrub Me Mamma With a Boogie Beat, etc. got a university charter for a Boogie Woogie Club. At its first meeting, 300 students heard a new tune, Beat Me Dimitri-- tribute to Conductor Mitropoulos of the Minneapolis Symphony.

* Some others: Beethoven, Debussy, Borodin, Charpentier, Leoncavallo, Mascagni.

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