Mozart con Carne

Doughty, eloquent, imperially-bearded Sir Thomas Beecham sipped a spot of Scotch in Mexico City last week and glanced around at the state of things. Said he to a reporter: "I am willing to admit that there is an opera house here, my dear fellow, but nobody seems in charge of it." Sir Thomas had stepped ambitiously into the same musical scene which had proved almost too much for Leopold Stokowski last spring (TIME, June 5). But unlike Conductor Stokowski, who tried appeasement, Conductor Beecham proposed to deal with the situation in his own sharp, 18th-Century style.

Invited by Mexican and British authori ties to Mexico to conduct a festival of three Mozart operas, Sir Thomas arrived to find a rival opera season in full swing at Mexico City's only opera house. Promised Government support for his festival had failed to materialize. One of his leading singers, Basso Carlos Rufino, had recently shot an amatory rival in a Mexico City movie theater and was giving rehearsals a discouragingly defensive tone by packing a pistol.

No sooner had Sir Thomas started rehearsing than his rivals announced a performance of Mozart's Don Giovanni for the night before Beecham had scheduled it.

With a sheaf of Metropolitan names and half the critics in town on their payroll, his rivals looked as if they might take the box office out from under the remarkable British Mozartian. Worried, British AmBassador Charles Bateman thought Sir Thomas ought to leave Mexico in a huff.

But Sir Thomas accepted the challenge, postponed his opening a week.

Last week the rival Don Giovanni came off. Despite a few first-rate voices, it resembled a turgid Italian antipasto rather than an exquisite Mozartian souffle. One of the first-rate voices, the Metropolitan Opera's great comic basso, Salvatore Baccaloni, summed it all up by saying: "It stank, if I say so myself." Said the critic of Novedades: "The performance could only be described as weird. Unfortunately, those who did not attend may have been misled by one of my distinguished colleagues who rushed into print Sunday morning stating that the performance could hardly be equaled at Covent Garden or any European capital. Unfortunately his paper goes to bed at midnight, whereas the performance dragged on desperately until 2:15. His crystal ball must have been out of order."

Mexico's musical connoisseurs waited for the Don Giovanni of Sir Thomas Beecham.

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