Yankee Invasion

After Manhattan's Metropolitan, the most important opera house in the Western Hemisphere is Buenos Aires' Teatro Colon. There, every year during the cool, long nights from May to October, porteno socialites and intellectuals walk down velvet-carpeted aisles to sit in rose plush chairs and gilded boxes, listening to the world's greatest singers.

Since Argentina produces comparatively few opera singers of its own, most of the Teatro Colon's stars are imported. In normal times, they come from Europe. This year its vocal supply lines cut by war, the management had little choice but to gamble on U.S. imports.

By last week it was evident that the gamble would pay off. Box office was up over previous years by 30%. Skeptical portenos, who had been surprised to find that Americans could sing opera at all, ended by figuratively carrying the Yankees on their shoulders.

No. 1 artistic hit of the Colon season had been St. Louis-born Helen Traubel's massive Isolde ("She looks like a cow," commented one aficionado, "but her Liebestod leaves us paralyzed"). Cleveland-born Rose Bampton, in Gluck's Armide, was the season's top box office draw. Gaunt, North Carolina-born Norman Cordon acquired a near monopoly of the leading bass parts. But the biggest popular idol of the Colon season was Baritone Leonard Warren, who was born in The Bronx and reached the Met five years ago. Stocky, swarthy Leonard Warren, in such full-blooded, garlicky roles as Rigoletto and Germont, had made a bigger noise in Buenos Aires than any baritone since the great Titta Ruffo. One of the Met's good stock-in-trade baritones, Warren had become the Colon's gran divo. Porteno opera fans would inquire excitedly: "What time does Warren sing Eri tu?" At that time the theater would fill up.

The popularity of the U.S. stars irked more than one member of the Buenos Aires Italian Colony. Grumbled the Italian-language daily Il Mattino D'Italia; "We practically have no season this year." The cash register told a different story. So did the inter-American relations scoreboard. No high-toned official mission had taken Traubel, Bampton, Warren and Cordon to Buenos Aires, but cultured Argentines agreed that the U.S. opera stars were doing an extraordinarily efficient job of brightening U.S.-Argentine friendship --which right now needs a good deal of brightening.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.