Leginska

Certain components of great opera audiences--though they have paid well for their plush stalls or rigid chairs, though a magnificent scene is discovered before them, though famed singers appear, deathless music plays--are nevertheless observed to close their eyes. Are they lamentable creatures? Poor dolts who have no eye for the noble, no ear for the exquisite? Long have they been so considered by those other operagoers whose eyes remain open. Not so are they regarded by Miss Leginska, English pianist-composer-conductor, whose opera written around Thackeray's story The Rose and the Ring is soon to have its premiere. She holds the theory that these 40-winkers close their eyes, not because they are bored, but because they fear to be disenchanted. They are those idealists who are more often perturbed by what they see than ravished by what they hear; who have listened, at Tosca, to an aria that spoke to them of all the rapture, the pathos of a consummate and fated love, and have seen a stubby tenor waddle forward on tiptoe to knead the arms of a diva who out-topped him by several inches; who have heard, in Boheme, a little catch, light as a falling feather, gay as a string of beads, delivered by a Musetta under whom a property table, reinforced with iron struts, trembled, creaked, tottered. These idealists, holds Madame Leginska, should be placated. Hence, in her forthcoming opera, there will be two complete casts--one of voiceless actors who will elegantly posture and grimace on the stage, one of unseen singers, who will yodel from a pit, concealed with the instruments of the orchestra. Said she: "Why should a man be exhibited on the stage, throwing out his arms and legs in the. stilted fashion of bygone times just because he can sing? For my opera, I want good actors on the stage good singers in the pit."

*WAGNER AS MAN AND ARTIST -- Ernest Newman--Knopf ($5.00),