International A?

Since 1859 the French standard for A (pitch used for orchestra tuning, traditionally given by the oboe or clarinet) has been a tuning fork scaled to, vibrate 870.9 times per sec. at a temperature of 15DEG Centigrade.* Though it has never been adopted officially by international convention the French A has gradually obtained all over the world. Last fortnight Dr. Carl Maria Haselbrunner, editor of the Oesterreicliische Musikerzeitung and honorary president of the Austrian Musical Association strongly declared for such a convention. "There is a terrible chaos in tuning," said he, "a regular musical anarchy. And all because one man in an orchestra . . . sets the A higher or lower to suit his own whim. Why, if any two orchestras, and the best ones at that, were suddenly brought together, they'd be out of tune! It's a ridiculous musical situation. ... It actually happened to Hans Richter/- that when he complained of the tuning by a clarinettist the man answered, 'I'm all right, but the rest of the orchestra is too low.' "

Dr. Haselbrunner would set up a rigid, whim-proof A and agree to abide by it. He would then have it pressed on phonograph discs for world distribution. He would broadcast it at intervals much as Greenwich Time is broadcast.

Best means for such pitch dissemination would be the radio. The phonograph is unreliable since the slightest variation of the turntable from set speed (78 revolutions per min.) changes the pitch. The veracity of tuning-forks depends upon atmospheric and temperature constancy. Dr. Haselbrunner's convention would put a stop to an occasional practice of recording laboratories, namely, varying the pitch to fit the peculiar abilities of recording artists, a practice distressing to persons with a sense of absolute pitch.

Sheik Scoop

That the late, woman-worshiped Cinemactor Valentino may have died at just the right time--before talking & singing pictures came in--for his memory to remain inviolate in countless lovelorn breasts, was indicated last week when Wanamaker's department store in Manhattan made this unexpected announcement:

"First and exclusive release of the only recording of the voice of Rudolph Valentino singing his favorite ballad

"Kashmiri Song, in English

"Also El Relicario, in Spanish."

A natural question was: If such a recording existed, why was it not released until four years after Valentino's death?

The story: In 1923, Brunswick-Balke-Collender Co. asked Valentino, then, the rage in The Sheik and The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, to try making records. They rehearsed him on operatic arias but were not pleased. He slurred, mumbled, muffed, his diction was atrocious. Finally the Kashmiri Song (because he sang it mutely in The Sheik) and El Relicario (because of his Latin cast) were chosen. To Conductor Ralph Mazziotta who coached him, Valentino inscribed a photograph "In remembrance of my first record. (Hope it is a good one!)"

Conductor Mazziotta carefully kept the photograph but when he listened to Valentino's record he looked sad. It just would not do. The record was shelved.

At Valentino's fantastically elaborate funeral someone regretted that the voice of the dead sheik was stilled forever. "But no," declared another mourner, "he made a record! I heard. . . ." But memory failed as to where or when, and alert Walter King, president of Celebrity Recording Co. (Hollywood) who had overheard the remark, could learn no more.

Then began a search that took President King from Atlantic to Pacific. But no Valentino record did he find. By pure, accident the master record was unearthed in a dusty corner of a storeroom at Brunswick's factory in Muskegon, Mich. President King bought the rights for his company--but last week the Valentino "scoop" awaited a public that seemed not to care. What Brunswick had rejected and forgotten as unworthy of its standard. Wanamaker's vended not very successfully. In the first three days less than 1,000 records were sold. Valentino singing as with a mouthful of spaghetti seemed not to have the appeal of the sleek silent Sheik of the oldtime cinema.*

Opera Into Golf

The ninth hole will be in the orchestra pit where Campanini and Polacco once called to life again Wagner, Mozart, Mendelssohn. On the same stage where Chaliapin, Muzio, Garden once swayed Chicago with great singing, will be a hotdog stand and a faked country club done in stucco. There will be two links: one of nine holes in the foyer where Chicago's first families once paraded to be seen, one of 18 on the main floor beneath the names of Gluck, Handel. Beethoven, Schubert, Liszt, Verdi. Such, Chicagoans learned last week, is to be the fate of the old Auditorium Theatre, scene since 1889 of the Midwest's best opera, abandoned last year for the new Civic Opera House.

Jeritza's Salome

"Am I to sing to a cocoanut? To dance to a watermelon concealed beneath a bit of cloth? Mein Gott! Am I to kiss a cabbage under a sheet, pretending that I embrace the red lips of the prophet? Imagine me singing the words of that apostrophe to a turnip or a cabbage under a bit of rag."

Thus stormed blonde & beauteous Maria Jeritza (Baroness von Popper) last week on the eve of the second night of San Francisco's autumn opera season and her U. S. debut in the title role of Strauss's Salome. (Massenet's Motion was the opener on the preceding evening.) She had learned that the head of Jochanaan would not be the usual papier-mache replica but a makeshift carefully concealed under a cloth from the gaze of moral San Franciscans.

Though she lost her point, Jeritza won San Francisco for her own. The audience jamming Civic Auditorium sat in rapt attention as they saw her transformed from a querulous princess intrigued by a captive prophet into a voluptuous animal crying brutally for the love, the body, the life of Jochanaan. Her Dance of the Seven Veils was lascivious, her entreaties to Herod for the prophet's head brutal and wanton. At the cistern during Jochanaan's execution (unlike Mary Garden in the same role) she was all animal thirsting for blood, listening for death struggle sounds that did not come. When she raised the cloth on the silver platter to kiss the dead lips listeners sat in amazement at the incompatible hate and golden singing. When the curtain swung down on her violent death it was a long moment before a hand was lifted in applause. Then began an ovation lasting a quarter of an hour with repeated curtain calls for Jeritza and Conductor Gaetano Merola.

Jeritza had never before sung Salome except under the personal direction of Composer Strauss. Instead of the usual 30 rehearsals which Strauss insists upon there were but two (which she directed). She had long desired to play Salome in the U. S., but Manhattan's Metropolitan which mostly claims her services has banned it.

Last night Clare Clairbert, Belgian coloratura soprano in her U. S. debut, sang coolly, sweetly, well the wanton Violette in Verdi's once frowned-on La Traviata, opposite Beniamino Gigli's capable Alfred Germont.

*The French count separately each backward and forward stroke of the tuning fork's vibration. In the U. S. and Great Britain one vibration is considered to consist of two strokes. Thus the U. S. and British A is 435-45 (one-half the French) vibrations per sec.

/- Famed Hungarian conductor at Bayreuth Festivals from 1876 to 1912, great & good friend of Wilhelm Richard Wagner.

*Last week in Paris Paul Roger of the Pathe group was planning the synchronization of Valentino's Blood and Sand, as a test for making dead stars talk, with a Valentino mimic capable of gauging and timing the dialog accurately.

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