Mezzo from Ohio

A tall girl with dark brown braids and a mezzo-soprano voice stepped out on the Metropolitan Opera's gilt-framed stage for the first time. Making her debut as Fricka in Die Walkuere, Blanche Thebom (pronounced thee-bum), 25, threw Manhattan's normally low-pressure music critics into fits of excitement: "Remarkable! ... a natural . . . strikingly handsome . . . exceptional vocal endowments. . . ."

That was last December. Last week, in her second big Met role (Brangaene in Tristan und Isolde), Thebom did it again. The sustained critical cheers confirmed her triumph: not only had she successfully made the rare and perilous jump from a Baptist church choir loft in Canton, Ohio to the Metropolitan's stage, but she could plan to stay a while.

Pennsylvania-born Blanche was set to be an office worker--until, at a ship's concert on a trip to Sweden with her Swedish-born parents, she found her career. To a fellow passenger, Marian Anderson's onetime accompanist Kosti Vehanen, her untrained mezzo-soprano sounded like unmistakable opera material. Vehanen shouted his enthusiastic opinion to anyone who would listen. When Blanche got home, her boss's parents agreed to finance her training.

Reluctant to leave the security of her office job, practical Blanche set out for Manhattan to study in 1939. Her incessant, night & day practicing eventually got her ejected from her apartment. She tried out unsuccessfully for the Met in 1941, '42 and '43.

Then, early last year, everything happened at once. She sang at Town Hall; the Met rushed over with a contract. Hollywood's Gregory Ratoff began looking for what he called a touch of "class" for his cinema biography of Composer Ernest R. Ball; two weeks later, Thebom was in Hollywood singing Mother Machree and Dear Little Boy of Mine. The cameras caught her twice, briefly, but she added the necessary class to the movie called Irish Eyes Are Smiling.

She enjoyed Hollywood, but suffered no indecision about her career. During the last six years she has kept her eye straight on the Met. As she says, "There isn't much else, is there?"

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