New Opera

Opera, kept woman of the arts, got out and hustled last week. In a Manhattan theater, the endless tunes of Mozart's Cosi fan tutte ("Thus do all women"--or more freely translated, The Way of All Flesh) prattled along at prices of $1.10 to $3.30. Its young, energetic performers were a new opera company, named the New Opera Company. Their impresario was a handsome socialite, Helen Huntington Astor Hull, ex-wife of Vincent Astor, now wife of Real-Estate Broker Lytle Hull--one of those great & good women who support the Metropolitan Opera in the style to which it is accustomed.

Cosi fan tutte's plot is an absurd and tedious business about how two Italians prove their sweethearts faithless by disguising themselves as Albanians, and winning the girls handily. The New Opera acted as if its efforts with this situation were funny, and as if 18th-Century gags in Italian were comprehensible to Broadway. But the singers, only one of whom was over 40, voiced their airs and ensembles with Mozartean freshness and purity. Only one had big-time stage experience--Ina Souez, who was born Ina Rains in Denver, and had sung in Cosi jan tutte in Glyndebourne, England, where costly and flawless Mozart performances were given before the war.

From Glyndebourne, too, came the New Opera's conductor of last week--hulking, moon-faced German Fritz Busch. This week the New Opera revives Verdi's Macbeth, seldom heard in the U.S. since 1850. Other revivals: Tchaikovsky's Pique Dame, whose lush melodies and story of a gambler's fate have pleased European but not U.S. audiences, and La Vie Parisienne --Offenbach's satire on the gaslit vulgarities of France's Second Empire.

Backed by $50,000 in socialite money, the New Opera will consider itself a success, and get a spring season, if the house (1,500 seats) is 60% sold for six weeks. The New Opera is far from regarding itself as a competitor of the Metropolitan; it hopes rather to prepare some of its 50 singers for that lordly stage.

For dear dignity's sake, two jazzmen prepared to slough their nicknames. As opening wedge, "Pee Wee" Irwin demanded billing as George "Pee Wee" Irwin. "Muggsy" Spanier became Francis "Muggsy" Spanier. "Fats" Waller, "Cootie" Williams, "Wingy" Mannone, "Buster" Bailey stood pat.

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