Thill, Tell, Tour

Tenors held the stage at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera last week. Georges Thill of the Paris Opera made his debut singing Romeo opposite the Juliette of Soprano Grace Moore. His manner was gracious, his legs shapely in tights. The audience attributed his tonal inaccuracies to nervousness, applauded him vigorously. Next afternoon the shabby scenery of William Tell came out of seven-year hiding to give Tenor Giacomo Lauri-Volpi a chance to storm the gallery with his high C's.

In two more weeks the Metropolitan will set forth on its annual spring tour. The itinerary:

Baltimore--Mignon, April 13; To sea, April 15; Lucia di Lammermoor, April 17; La Traviata, April 18.

Washington--Tosca, April 14; Mignon, April 15, matinee; Peter Ibbetson, April 16.

White Plains--La Traviata, April 20; Lucia, April 25.

Cleveland--La Traviata, April 27; Tosca, April 28; Mignon, April 29; Carmen, April 30; Rigoletto, May 1, matinee; Norma, May 1, evening; Peter Ibbetson, May 2, matinee; Lucia, May 2, evening.

Rochester--La Traviata, May 4.

Touring this spring will be both French newcomers: Soprano Lily Pons and Tenor Thill. Soprano Maria Jeritza, for nine years a member of the company, will go on tour for the first time.

Wozzeck in Philadelphia

Murder was done last week in Philadelphia. Two notes by the Philadelphia Orchestra told the tragedy with all the force of a grim newspaper headline. The soldier Wozzeck had killed his mistress for philandering with a drum-major, left her lying on the edge of a pond with blood making a strange red necklace around her throat.

Wozzeck was a poor, pasty-faced fellow as he appeared in the Philadelphia Grand Opera's premiere performance of Austrian Alban Berg's opera. He was browbeaten by his dull-witted captain, heckled by a crack-brained doctor who gave him a few pfennig now & then for the privilege of experimenting on him. One day when he took his money home to his mistress he found her preening herself before a mirror. She was wearing earrings which she said she had found. Strange, thought Wozzeck. He had never found anything like that, two at a time. . . .

Until this hint of the crime, attention at last week's premiere wandered somewhat. The audience was conscious of its own importance,* conscious that a special train had brought a talkative, critical crowd from Manhattan; that Mrs. Mary Louise Curtis Bok who financed the production was entertaining Banker Otto Hermann Kahn, financial director of Manhattan's Metropolitan; that the hands casting grotesque shadows on the vaulted ceiling belonged to Philadelphia's imperious Conductor Leopold Stokowski who was making his operatic debut. True to his penchant for innovations, Stokowski had a cradle telephone installed on his dais. He telephoned importantly backstage each time he was ready for the curtain to go up.

Composer Berg's music was perplexing at first. It had all the dissonances to be expected of a pupil of modernistic Arnold Schoenberg. There were no conventional harmonies, no set songs. Baritone Ivan Ivantzoff (Wozzeck) sometimes spoke, sometimes sang his lines. Soprano Anne Roselle (Marie, Wozzeck's mistress) had music so hideously difficult that it defied full, smooth tones. Robert Edmond Jones's simple, color-splashed sets had more general appeal: a ghoulish eye set in a screen for the doctor's examining office; the elongated shadow of a stack of guns for the soldier's barracks; a festoon of colored lights for a beer garden; a street in the town all angles and planes.

The two unisonal crescendoes which announced the murder announced also that Composer Berg had music worthy of the superb production. Wozzeck with his hands all blood staggering into a tavern where people were dancing to a tone-sick piano, Wozzeck going back for the knife, then wading into the water to wash him self, deeper, deeper until he drowned -- for these scenes and for an earlier one, in which the conscience-ridden Marie reads passages on adultery from the New Testa ment, Composer Berg has written music which critics unanimously pronounce the most powerful in any opera for years. Like his leading character it is neither lofty nor noble but it effectively describes Wozzeck, like the Wozzeck in Georg Buchner's play (TIME, March 16), as any downtrodden wretch tortured beyond endurance. A per fect ending is the epilog in which Marie's little son hears the news from children in the street, goes on unconcernedly riding his hobby-horse.

* Present were Conductors Ossip Gabrilowitsch, Nikolai Sokoloff, Walter Damrosch, Artur Bodansky, Ernest Schelling, Composers Deems Taylor, George Gershwin, Arthur Shepherd, Aaron Copland, Violinist Efrem Zimbalist, Soprano Lucrezia Bori, General Manager Giulio Gatti-Casazza of the Metropolitan Opera, French Ambassador Paul Claudel (librettist of Darius Milhaud's Christopher Columbus).

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.