Only Make-Believe

Hollywood can do anything. Liszt had never even tried to write a serious opera. Mendelssohn had started one but never finished it. Hollywood fashioned two operas and signed their names to them.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer wanted something operatic for Two Sisters from Boston (TIME, June 17). MGM's musicmakers scrambled through the classics. The trouble was, none of the old boys knew how to start an opera right. They had a rousing overture, the curtain rose, and a bunch of minor characters went into some tedious, scene-setting song. What Hollywood wanted was an overture, curtain, and zowie--a tenor aria for Lauritz Melchior.

An arranger and two lyricists set to work. From Mendelssohn's Ruy Bias Overture and the slow movement of the Violin Concerto in E Minor they pasted together a scene in an "opera" they billed as Marie Antoinette; from Liszt's Les Preludes, Hungarian Rhapsody No. 14 and Liebestraeume they contrived another called My Country. Sample lyrics:

Green is the hill and the valley,

And gold is the grape on the vine,

Songs fill the air, of the harvest,

Tra-la-la-la-la-la-la. . . .*

The film credits ("operatic sequences adapted from Liszt and Mendelssohn") were worded so as neither to rouse the knowing nor disabuse the ignorant.

Last week RCA-Victor released an album of the phony operas, sung by Melchior and Soprano Nadine Conner. Victor expects to sell more copies of it than any grand opera album in its catalogue.

* Copyright 1946 Leo Feist, Inc. Used by permission.

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