Censure

Some weeks ago (TIME, March 1) 19-year-old Marion Nevada Talley, daughter of a Kansas City telegrapher, made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera House, Manhattan. She had sung in opera only twice before, with a small civic company in her home town. She was thoroughly inexperienced in the woes and wiles of operatic routine. But U. S. newspapermen seized upon her, made her their best news, roused a great public to have an exorbitant pride in a person it had never heard sing.

Europeans, getting word of the furor, were inclined to be scornful of "American hysteria." Emma Calve, living now in retirement on the Riviera, took it more personally. For had not she and her sisters in singing had years of preparation before they were ready for the Metropolitan? She was indignant, protested last week against the system which would permit of such a premature Metropolitan debut. Said she: "No singer should be subjected to such a test without at least ten years' preparatory work on other stages. . . . Too much publicity at an early age and not enough hard work are the ailments affecting the present generation of vocal students. When I was a student every waking hour was spent in study. Now there seem to be so many diverting influences that it is a wonder singers are produced at all. To become a great singer one must first have the voice and then one must have the determination to learn every trick in using it. Great singers are produced ever so slowly."

Among the first to read Mme. Calve's protest was William J. Guard, kindly press agent of the Metropolitan, who watches over his flock like a mother hen. He fumed, he fussed, he ruffled his feathers, flapped his great wings, said:

"Mme. Calve knows nothing about Miss Talley's musical antecedents, nor does she know how much work the young girl put in for her career. Calve was a great artiste, but she might have been a greater had she been a better musician. She knew little about reading music, and had to have it fairly drummed into her.

"As for her remarks about diversions, I do not think Calve devoted her every minute to study, although she worked hard. Mme. Calve's remark about publicity -- well, she did not scorn publicity herself, and she knew how to get it, too!"

Meanwhile the cause of all the comment had packed up and, with Mother Talley, started on her first professional concert tour. She went to Hartford, Conn., was met at the train by a delegation of prominent Hartfordians, was escorted to the City Hall, where Mayor Norman C. Stevens presented her with the keys of the city.

Dull

A tiny theatre in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan opened its doors for the first time last week, admitted a capacity audience of 290 persons and sought to entertain them with The Immortal Hour, opera by Rutland Boughton based on the play by Fiona Macleod (William Sharp), first venture of the Opera Players, Inc.*

They had come, the 290, with no small measure of expectancy, to hear the first U.S. performance of the one and only Immortal Hour, which has been the rage in England for more than a decade now, and has had nearly 500 performances in Birmingham alone.

The 290 found Poet Macleod's lovely wordy lyrics to have little theatrical value, to be full of involved figures of speech and manifold references to an unfamiliar Celtic mythology, found that they gained little by companionship with Mr. Composer Rutland's mediocre score, that the production as a whole, though creditable, was decidedly amateurish. Above all things else they found it dull. They fidgeted in their chairs, marveled at their English brethren, prayed, after they had sat through two hours and more, that for them at least it would not prove to be immortal.

* New organization dedicated to the purpose of making opera a part of the daily life of U.S. citizens in a manner artistically similar to that pursued in Europe.