Opera Pays

In New York three blocks from the Metropolitan Opera House, where public donations were solicited this winter to assure another season, grand opera is being made to pay. The Metropolitan's best seats cost $7. Best seats for Hippodrome opera cost 99-c-. Metropolitan performances are put on by a long-experienced impresario who has listened to opera since his cradle days. Opera at the Hippo drome is the venture of two hard-headed theatre men who care nothing about music. But a few years ago when Cecil E. Mayberry was managing a movie house in Chicago he became interested in the money troubles of the Civic Opera Com pany, blamed the high admissions. He and William A. Carroll, who has run hotels and furniture stores in the Midwest, went to New York to put on cheap movies in the giant Hippodrome. This spring they fell in with Alfredo Salmaggi.

Alfredo Salmaggi is a long-haired Italian who wherever he goes carries a silver-topped cane which belonged to Caruso and loves to tell about the days when he taught Italy's Queen Margherita to play the mandolin. Salmaggi has an Aida complex. He has given Verdi's spectacular opera in Egypt at the foot of the pyramids, in Mexico City's bull ring, in dozens of open-air stadiums. He uses elephants, camels, horses. The Hippodrome venture started out as an all-Aida affair. Some 10,000 passes were given out for the first performances but to the management's amazement hundreds had to be turned away from the boxoffice. Passes were discontinued but people went on fighting to get into the Hippodrome (nearly 6,000 cap ). The repertoire was enlarged to include other standard operas. Carmen was to be given with a real live hull. The casts hastily scrambled together were surprisingly good. The orchestra was ragged, the scenery shoddy.

The Chicago Opera Company, so-named after an Aida performance Salmaggi put on at Soldier Field last autumn, ends its Hippodrome run this week on the crest of financial success. During the summer Salmaggi intends to put on open-air Aida in Newark, Boston, Pittsburgh, in the dirigible hangar in Akron. Between times he will hear new singers, rehearse diligently, get new scenery together for the autumn when he will give two months of opera at the Hippodrome. Backers Mayberry and Carroll care nothing about spreading culture (the tin-cup cry of the Metropolitan). But if their autumn venture is as successful as the one just ending they may continue giving opera into the winter, offer the Metropolitan its only opposition since Oscar Hammerstein built his 34th Street theatre, drew such crowds that Otto Kahn paid him a million dollars to go away.

Mayfair Ballads

To New Yorkers who frequent expensive speakeasies, Dwight Fiske has long been a familiar personality. Lean, hatchet-faced, with hands like carefully manicured claws and a bald-spot on his narrow skull, they have seen him hunched scornfully in front of a grand piano, intoning his unique compositions with an air at once chipper, elegant and insulting. Last winter Dwight Fiske progressed from speakeasies to Manhattan's most elegant cafe, the Mayfair Yacht Club. Last week two things made it appear that his celebrity-- like that of Helen Morgan and Jimmy Durante who preceded him from the orchidaceous gloom of cabarets into the glare of Broadway and the cinema-- would presently outgrow Manhattan. It was rumored that he was soon to leave the Mayfair Yacht Club for Hollywood where his wit, properly censored, would provide an element thus far missing (see p. 30) in musical productions. Last week also, to the amazement of his admirers who had never for a moment supposed that any of his recitations might be printable, Dwight Fiske published his first book, Without Music.*

In Dwight Fiske's book, all the characters--except a preposterous old woman from Boston (where Without Music should be banned) who goes to Egypt and allows herself to be waylaid by an ostrich--lead decadent sex lives. Characteristically deplorable is the case of Clarissa the Flea who traveled from Vera Cruz to New York on an old tramp. Spanish and nervous, she had no difficulty in working her way into the heart of New York society. Clarissa's mother joined Sir Hubert Wilkins' expedition to the North Pole, conducted an equivocal expedition into the interior. As for Clarissa, she joined the flea circus, made a trip to Washington on Premier Laval, died, in a blaze of typically Fiskean capital letters, when "She tried to come between two HAPPY LOVERS."

Punctuation and typography (the counterpart of his musical counterpoint and bizarre arpeggios) are as important and far more intelligible in the verse forms of Dwight Fiske than in those of E. E. Cummings. The Fiske version of the tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra starts as follows:

The Egyptians called Cleopatra the Symbol of Love, But the Romans called her just a PUSHOVER!

Composed almost entirely of double entendres, the sadly cruel little narratives in Without Music all convey an attitude of fatigued scorn, like that of the Parisians in "Mr. Jones's Night Off" who "didn't even bother to look up when he ranted at them."

" 'Il est fou,' they whispered, and ordered more and more champagne."

Mr. Jones ended up by having an escapade with Mistinguette, then went home to the flat where his wife, Mabel, and their five children were waiting. "But Mabel only opened one of her Sioux City eyes and said:

'Go to Hell, Father of Two.' "

Very few of Fiske's pale paraphrases of barroom jokes, his irrelevant elaborations of smoking-room mythology, are as frankly dramatic as "Mr. Jones's Night Off." Most famed is the ballad of "Ida, The Wayward Sturgeon"--a wretchedly voluptuous fish who said to herself: "There must be more to this sex-life than just swimming over each other's eggs." She put a badge on her right shoulder saying "I will share," paid a visit to Fanny Bored, the world's oldest mermaid, finally had an uncomfortable liaison on a barnacle bed, with an octopus.

Not all the readers of Without Music should be expected to echo the comment of Robert Benchley in his introduction: ". . . It makes me feel better about having laughed so loud at Dwight Fiske in night clubs. I always have had a suspicion that I was drunk. Now I know that I was merely appreciative. . . ."

For New Yorkers with catholic tastes in music who call at the Mayfair Yacht Club after the opera, Dwight Fiske has a peculiarly disdainful opus called "The Pleasure-Dome of Kubla Kahn," in which Manhattan's most aristocratic esthetes are languidly identified with fish and weeds.

Like most expert humorists, Dwight Fiske started out in earnest to achieve the ends which he now so skilfully contemns. After a polite upbringing in Boston, he started out at Harvard in 1912, left to study music at the Paris Conservatoire. After composing a symphony of which he says "It was terrible. . . . Have you got an aspirin?" he met Marie Dressier at a party, regaled her with his musical arrangement of President & Mrs. Harding receiving the children for the annual eggroll on the White House lawn at Easter. Marie Dressier put him on a benefit performance bill. Presently he was appearing at the Bat Club in London where Tallulah Bankhead and the Prince of Wales were equally enthusiastic.

*The Chatham Press. Drawings by Scott Wilson. Price $3.50 with a phonograph record on which Mr. Fiske plays the piano and recites the adventures of "Ida, The Wayward Sturgeon."

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