Program Notes

Next to Salome's, the most popular of operatic strip teases is that of Massenet's sin-shunning Thais. Because dramatic sopranos with decently strippable figures are rare, and because Massenet's music and drama are otherwise soupy and dull, Thais is nowadays seldom performed. Greatest of all Thais strippers was famed Diva Mary Garden, who introduced the part to the U. S. in 1907; last at Manhattan's Metropolitan was tempestuous Maria Jeritza, 13 years ago. Last week the Metropolitan revived Thais, in one of the most lavishly costumed productions of its recent years. This time the stripper was Helen Jepson, streamlined Pennsylvania-born soprano. Critics approved Soprano Jepson's singing and her French diction but thought she undressed with a Pennsylvania accent.

P: Most famous teacher of composers today is a woman: grey-haired Nadia Boulanger (TIME, Feb. 28, 1938). For 30 years in her Paris studio Pedagogue Boulanger has been quietly hatching out one adept music-writer after another. Nearly every younger modernist who has ever been near Paris has taken a few lessons from her. Last week Teacher Boulanger took her prize pupil to Manhattan, there led the Philharmonic-Symphony in accompaniment while he played his best-known composition. The pupil: a slight, dark-haired, 26-year-old Frenchman named Jean Frangaix. The composition: his tricky, chattering, exuberant Piano Concerto, recorded four months ago by Victor (TIME, Nov. 7). Manhattanites were not impressed by Pundit Boulanger's claims that Composer Frangaix was "a genius," but they found his concerto an agreeable, earsome knickknack.

Finest opera to be heard at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House today is Wagner opera. And the most important and painstaking of its Wagnerian productions are those of the two Nibelungen Ring cycles which attract some 8,000 listeners annually. No light-headed cafe socialites are they. Wagner's Nibelungen epic consists of four ponderous operas (Rheingold, Walkure, Siegfried, Gotterdammerung) totaling 14 hours of music & drama, requires tremendous listening endurance. But for eight years every Metropolitan Ring cycle has been sung to a sold-out house. Last week the first of this year's cycles opened. For a continuous two hours and a quarter (Rheingold has no intermission) the intrepid listeners took it and liked it. Only one woman had to be carried out.

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