A Carmen Dies

In her native Millau in southern (unoccupied) France, a white-haired woman of 83 died last week. For a generation of operagoers, Emma Calve and Carmen had been synonymous.

Of the divas of the "Golden Age," only 71-year-old Olive Fremstad and 76-year-old Emma Eames were left. Emma Calve had outlived Tetrazzini, Sembrich, Schumann-Heink by a few years, Melba, Nordica, Patti by many.

Calve's Carmen, which she first flaunted at U.S. audiences nearly 50 years ago, is poorly preserved by her bosomy photographs or the cavernous sounds of her model-T recordings. One critic, the late Henry E. Krehbiel, better recorded her effect on the half-fascinated, half-scandalized audiences of her day: "She presented a woman thoroughly wanton and diabolically equipped with the wicked witcheries which explained, if they did not palliate, the conduct of Don Jose. . . . In some respects [she] left absolutely nothing to the imagination." Calve herself loathed the role, but she sang it as often as 14 times a season.

Like Tetrazzini, Soprano Calve tried to cash in on her name with a U.S. vaudeville tour, in 1927. Then she returned to Millau, where she owned a fortress-like chateau, to raise sheep, train younger singers, entertain elderly gallants. She sold the chateau before World War II.

Vichy dispatches were brief, but in her mountain village Emma Calve had probably long been cold, ill, half-starved. Most old ladies in France are, these days.

James Caesar Petrillo, boss of the Musicians' Union, decided to allow Sergei Koussevitzky, conductor of the non-union Boston Symphony, to keep a date in New York. Boss Petrillo, relenting after a personal plea from "a great humanitarian," Marshall Field III, agreed to let Koussevitzky conduct the New York Philharmonic-Symphony--just this once.

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