New Era

When Giulio Gatti-Casazza took his name plate from his office door last spring and for the last time hulked out of the shabby old Metropolitan Opera House, a musical era reached its end in Manhattan. For 27 years Giulio Gatti-Casazza had guided the Metropolitan's affairs shrewdly and cosily. At its best his long regime stood for many a stirring performance, for the presentation of many a top-notch singer, for real opera glamour. The end was different. Though the tired old impresario was granted every honor, his spirit seemed broken when Depression left his Company impoverished and its directors resorted to a tin-cup campaign.

Rank & file of the performances grew more & more routine and the Metropolitan's name lost much of its luster. The future of opera in Manhattan was unpredictable when the last curtain was rung down on the 1934-35 season.

Last week a new era was commencing inside the old opera house. Rarely had there been such bustling preparation. The orchestra rehearsed diligently, although the music was all familiar. The chorus chanted in German, French. Italian. Individual singers worked with conductors and stage directors. Pretty young ballerinas went through their paces hour after hour under the determined direction of George Balanchine, new maitre de ballet.

In the box-office Treasurer Earle Lewis proudly reported that subscription sales showed an increase of 35% over last season. Seats for the opening week were selling like bargain counter goods and there was not one to be had for love or money for opening night.

In the square old backstage office which used to be Gatti-Casazza's sat a cheerful youngish-looking man whom opera audiences had known as a romantic Romeo, a wistful Pelleas, a dreamy Peter Ibbetson. Last week Tenor Edward Johnson was dealing with hard realities, amiably settling disputes, busily drawing up schedules for 14 weeks to come. As a singer Tenor Johnson was never a rafter-rending vocalist but as an artist he was possessed of unfailing taste and intelligence, a man on friendly terms with all his colleagues, one who out of working hours could detach himself from opera and view it as a keen outsider.

Such qualities promised to be of invaluable aid to one suddenly drafted into the general managership of an opera company with 700 members, limited finances and a reputation to save.

Opener. This week the Metropolitan opened its new season with much the same boom of headlines and splash of socialite color as had marked its 51 other first nights. Bystanders crowded the sidewalks. Standees were early, boxholders late.

Photographers watched every limousine hoping to catch Goelets, Vanderbilts, Astors. Sight was to see some of the box-holders making hesitant entrances, eager to be photographed, while others scooted quietly to their places. Mrs. Vanderbilt was there wearing her characteristic hair-ribbon.

The first-night opera was Verdi's La Tramata which has long supplied Lucrezia Bori with the role best suited to her fluttering, enameled charm. Soprano Bori can do no wrong so far as her audience is concerned. As chief collector in the tin-cup campaign she was roundly publicized as the Metropolitan's "Little Savior." Paired with her was big Richard Crooks who sang smoothly, acted with increasing ease.

Baritone Lawrence Tibbett appeared as Tenor Crook's persuasive, grey-haired father, contributed the best singing of the evening. The American Ballet furnished sprightly dancers for the lavish ballroom scenes. There were fresh new settings by Designer Jonel Jorgulesco. And a young U. S. singer, plump, dark-haired Thelma Votipka, sang confidently but had little chance to prove herself.

Lineup. As first-night subscribers clustered in the corridors, talk was not of that one performance but of what could be expected from the Johnson regime. A new $75,000 ventilation system had been installed. In the refurbished bar there were red-coated waiters from Sherry's, shiny new 2-ft. cuspidors and for the first time in the Metropolitan's history glasses were washed in clear running water instead of being casually dipped in a bucket of soapsuds.

Manager Johnson's prospectus included no new U. S. opera. But the memory of Merry Mount and In the Pasha's Garden was still too painful to breed many regrets. In no instance did the list of 36 operas extend beyond the conventional repertoire, with Verdi, Wagner and Puccini predominating changes have been in the personnel. The orchestra has been reorganized, with the result that many of the less competent players are absent. In the chorus there are new youthful faces. The stodgy old ballet has been replaced by the new U. S. organization founded two years ago by Lincoln Kirstein and Edward M. M. Warburg (TIME, Dec. 17, 1934 et seq.). More care has been given to scenery, costumes, lighting.

The line-up of singers is, on the whole, proud. Among the sopranos there are such experienced performers as Elisabeth Rethberg, Gertrude Kappel, Florence Easton, Lily Pons, Queena Mario, Edith Mason, Editha Fleischer, Rosa Ponselle, who will sing her first Carmen, and Lotte Lehmann who was to open the Philadelphia season in Tosca.

On the strength of her London success and her box-office power Cinemactress Grace Moore has been re-engaged. Pretty Helen Jepson will be given more leading roles than she had last season. Outstanding contraltos are Karin Branzell, Doris Doe, Gladys Swarthout, Cyrena Van Gordon, Rose Bampton, Kathryn Meisle and Marion Telva, who has been badly missed since she left the Metropolitan in 1931. Outstanding tenors: Lauritz Melchior, Paul Althouse, Giovanni Martinelli. Charles Hackett. Nino Martini. The baritones: Lawrence Tibbett, John Charles Thomas, Friedrich Schorr, Richard Bonelli. The bassos: Ezio Pinza, Ludwig Hofmann, Emanuel List, Leon Rothier.

Seventeen of the 79 singers are new this season and several of them richly deserved their appointments. Philadelphia's Dusolina Giannini has had great success in Germany and Austria. Australian Marjorie Lawrence has been a rage in Paris. Contralto Gertrud Wettergren is a favorite in her native Sweden. Tenor Charles Kullman (Yale, 1924) has done well for himself in Europe, as has Soprano Susanne Fischer of Sutton, W. Va., who will make her Metropolitan debut as Madame Butterfly. Two of the newcomers are Belgians : Tenor Rene Maison and Basso Hubert Raidich. Baritone Carlo Morelli is a Chilean, Eduard Habich, a German. Added to the U. S. contingent are Josephine Antoine, Hilda Burke, Charlotte Symons, Helen Oelheim, Julius Huehn, Dudley Marwick, Chase Baromeo, all with stage experience.

Evidence was that Manager Johnson was saving his experiments for the popular-priced supplementary season which will begin late in April. Such a season was one of the conditions imposed by the rich Juilliard Musical Foundation when it gave the Metropolitan $150,000 last March, demanded stronger representation on the Metropolitan board.* The Juilliard's choice for Manager was Herbert Witherspoon, oldtime Metropolitan basso and a member of the Juilliard's teaching staff. Witherspoon had the title for less than two weeks when he dropped dead in the opera house. Tenor Johnson inherited his job, with Edward Ziegler for an experienced, business-like assistant.

Guild. Manager Johnson's popularity and his frank, disarming manner made everyone eager to help him. Witherspoon had been unable to come to terms with such important singers as Pons, Ponselle, Tibbett. Johnson smoothed out such difficulties, won the invaluable support of Mrs. August Belmont who as Actress Eleanor Robson at the old Empire Theatre used to hurry across the street from her performances to buy standing room at the Opera House to hear Ternina, Calve, Caruso.

Two years ago Mrs. Belmont became the Metropolitan's first woman director. For the past four months she has devoted all her energy to the opera, as founder and chairman of the Opera Guild, an organization intended to boost the Metropolitan, create more general interest. Unlike the tin-cup campaign Mrs. Belmont's Guild offers specific returns for money collected. For $10 a person may become a sustaining Guild member, attend one dress rehearsal, one opera lecture. For $30 the reward is two dress rehearsals, two lectures, two orchestra seats for a regular performance. One hundred dollars brings a subscription seat for the entire opera season. One Guild aim is to make members better acquainted with the Metropolitan's inside workings. To that end there was a reception at the Opera House fortnight ago when 2,000 Guild members were given a chance to gape at the singers and the backstage staff, join in with Miss Bori when to the tune of The Battle Hymn of the Republic, directing her song straight to the box where the gracious white-haired lady sat, she sang:

Greater glory to the Opera, Greater glory to the Opera, Brava, brava, Mrs. Belmont, The Guild goes marching on.

Seat-Seller. The Guild has contributed substantially to the increase in seat sales. So, too, has one singer who made her debut last February. Finances had then reached their all-time low. No agreement had been made with the Juilliard and the Metropolitan seemed doomed. Suddenly then, like a clear northern light, Soprano Kirsten Flagstad appeared on the scene. So far as most New Yorkers were concerned, she was completely unknown. She had been engaged only because Frida Leider had decided that, with the devalued dollar, she could make more money by remaining in Europe. That February matinee made history in Manhattan.

As Sieglinde in Die Walkuere, Flagstad exhibited a voice so clear and powerful, so even throughout its range, so flawless in its phrasing that most critics went ecstatic. Four days later came Tristan und Isolde and all hats were in the air. Flagstad could sing. Though she indulged in no pyrotechnics, she was quietly effective as she raised the cup, offered the love potion to Tristan. Again at the end she reached rare heights when, with her voice still fresh and sure, she kneeled beside Tristan's body and sang the demanding Liebestod.

Thereafter whenever Flagstad sang, the house was crowded to the doors and Tristan und Isolde became the season's bestseller. Question on every side was where such a singer had been keeping herself. Answer was that for 20 years she had had an uneventful career in Norway, singing at the Oslo Opera house where her talent was taken for granted.

Temperamentally she was unable to push herself. As a child she sang arias because she liked to, not because she aspired to opera. Her mother who coached singers was responsible for her debut. Someone was needed for the role of Nuri in D'Albert's Tiefland. Flagstad learned the part in two days. After that she plodded along conscientiously, singing now in light opera, now in grand, taking what engagements she could get because she had a daughter to support by an early marriage which had proved unsuccessful.

Flagstad was 36 when she ventured beyond the Scandinavian boundaries to Bayreuth, sang small roles the first summer, Sieglinde the next. On the strength of her Bayreuth appearances, Gatti-Casazza and Conductor Artur Bodanzky asked her to come to St. Moritz and sing for them there. The room was small, her voice muffled by heavy hangings. But a new Wagnerian was badly needed and she was given a contract. When Conductor Bodanzky queried her about her acting, she answered modestly: "I don't do very much."

Even with a Metropolitan contract, Flagstad was loath to leave Norway. She had married Henry Johansen, a wealthy lumber merchant. The Christmas holiday season was on. She liked to ski and she dreaded new audiences. But if she was nervous before her debut, no one at the Metropolitan observed any sign of it. She knitted placidly before she went on stage, knitted between scenes. No high-strung person could have endured the ten weeks which followed. She had sung Elsa (Lohengrin) only in Norwegian, Elisabeth (Tannhaeuser) only in Swedish. Now she had to relearn both in German, a language which was hard for her.

Her most amazing accomplishments were the Bruennhildes in Die Walkiire and Goetterdaemmerung, the Kundry in Parsifal, roles she had never sung before. Only for these last two did she have the benefit of stage and orchestra rehearsals. But no one could have guessed it. To her colleagues she scarcely seemed human until the final Parsifal when she fell asleep on the stage, almost missed her cue.

Critics were so excited to hear a really great voice that everything Flagstad did was greeted with praise, some of it so indiscriminate that readers were led to believe that the greatest Wagnerian of all time had suddenly popped from the blue. Yet some laymen could marvel at her voice, at her poise, at her endurance and still wish at times that she possessed more fire, a more heroic conception of Wagner's great heroines. To some she seems curiously impersonal, a cold Northern light withal her great talent.

Offstage Kirsten Flagstad is a simple, unassuming person, who keeps no maid or secretary because she hates to have anyone fussing around her. She is shy with strangers, content to knit, play solitaire, see Greta Garbo cinemas, eat one spanking meal a day and treat herself to a half bottle of champagne when she feels that a performance has been a success. Since she arrived in the U. S. the hearty Norse has never had reason to deny herself the champagne reward. Like every singer who has made a Metropolitan success, she has taken to the road, given concerts before audiences which have seemingly found her perfect. This season she has already given 32 recitals in addition to four performances with the San Francisco Opera (TIME, Nov. 4). She made her concert debut in Manhattan last week and though her voice was sure and strong, it was sometimes grainy, perhaps from fatigue. Most singers who are suddenly acclaimed work themselves too hard. Flagstad wrote from Norway last summer: "I am so busy I almost wish I never was a success."

*There were two Juilliard trustees already on the Metropolitan board: Lawyer Allen Wardwell and Frederic A. Juilliard, nephew of the late Augustus D.

Juilliard who left $14,000,000 to music. The Metropolitan's board chairman, Paul Drennan Cravath, is a director of the Juilliard School of Music, as is Cornelius N. Bliss, chairman of the Metropolian's executive committee. Now the Opera must listen to three more Juilliard men: President John Erskine of the Juilliard School of Music, Dean Ernest Hutchinson, Lawyer John Morris Perry. Besides there is a new "management committee" to advise Edward Johnson. Its members: John Erskine, Allen Wardwell, Cornelius Bliss and Soprano Bori. Commenting on the Metropolitan situation in general, wise old William J. Henderson of the New York Sun referred this to Manager Johnson and his assistant Edward Ziegler: "These two men can run an opera house if they are allowed to. This assertion is made because it is not impossible that there may be too many cooks stirring the broth. If the numerous people who are active in Metropolitan affairs will not undertake to add artistic direction to their other manifold duties the institution will probably thrive and the treasury grow fat."

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