Monday, Feb. 08, 1937
Stage Dagger
Grand Opera, properly done, calls for a great deal of energetic tussling, smiting, stabbing, swooning and falling. Grand Opera performers are not artists unless they hurl themselves into the action as well as the music. It is surprising that more artists are not hurt, especially during rehearsals when they are working up routines, yet Grand Opera mishaps are usually more silly than solemn, and provide people with amusing table talk. Metropolitan devotees still chuckle over the impetuous Jeritza who kept falling and singing arias from unlikely positions. Oldsters remember how, in 1905 at the Met, the bridge across which Carmen was to make her escape suddenly collapsed and sent 15 members of the chorus sprawling. When Georg Anthes was singing Lohengrin in 1903, his swan-boat upset and flung him flat upon a painted ocean. In 1924 Curt Taucher, as Siegfried, was climbing the fire-girt rock when he unluckily stepped through a trapdoor.
The list of Metropolitan singers injured accidentally by spears and daggers is not so laughable. Upon this list last week appeared the first fatality.
A full cast had gathered in the Opera House to rehearse for the 40th time the third act of Richard Hageman's Caponsacchi, scheduled for its U. S. premiere this week. Baritone Lawrence Tibbett was singing the role of murderous Count Guido who stabs to death his wife and her parents. As he pretended to kill old Pietro, he turned his knife aside in traditional opera style, accidentally slashed Basso Joseph Sterzini between the thumb and forefinger. Sterzini pooh-poohed his wound, wanted to finish the scene. Tibbett, his friend for 15 years, had a tourniquet applied and sent for Joseph Siegel, the Metropolitan's doctor. Dr. Siegel found that an artery had been cut and sent Sterzini to the hospital. There, five hours later, Basso Joseph Sterzini died. Hospital authorities said: "Shock resulting from the stab wound . . . may have affected an already diseased heart and precipitated the cardiac attack." Police speedily exonerated Baritone Tibbett, who groaned: "Believe me, it was pretty tough. I feel terrible!"
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