Philadelphia Curtain

A sick man, narrowly escaped from death, recently asked the woman who had nursed him if she would please sing him Venus' music from Tannhaeuser. The request was no sick man's babbling. The woman happened to be a great singer. After her season with the Chicago Civic Opera Company last spring, she was preparing to sail for European engagements when a long-distance telephone call told her that a man whose identification papers mentioned her name was dying in a hotel in Springfield, Mass. The man, one Joseph McGriffs, had been brought up in Ohio as the singer's brother. She hurried to him, took him to a Manhattan hospital, put on nurse's garb and cared for him herself for three months.

For her foster-brother Cyrena Van Gordon sang Wagner's siren song in a nurse's uniform, to a bare piano accompaniment, but in Philadelphia last week she sang it in its rightful pagan setting. Languorously, with blandishment in every tone, she tried to stay the truant Tannhaeuser whose torn soul was marvelously depicted by the stately chords of holy Pilgrim music and the madly skirling strings of a Bacchanal. Tenor Gotthelf Pistor had the nasal, strutting manner of most German tenors, but his Tannhaeuser showed a certain dark-toned dignity. Conductor Fritz Reiner made a proud showing for his U. S. opera debut, the opening of the Philadelphia opera season.

Five years ago Philadelphia's Grand Opera Company was only a notion entertained by three people: Mrs. Joseph Leidy, socialite wife of a Philadelphia doctor, William Carl Hammer, an importer, and his wife, Kathryn O'Gorman Hammer, daughter of a bandmaster and herself an able slide-trombonist. The Hammers interested Mrs. Leidy in a local opera venture; Mrs. Leidy interested her friends who bought boxes. The Hammers became managers, announced six performances for the first season. Mr. Hammer attended to the box-office while Mrs. Hammer persuaded artists to sing on a co-operative basis, borrowed sets and properties, concocted on her own sewing-machine cheesecloth costumes for Aida, Carmen, Otello. Miraculously the first season ended without a deficit.

Kathryn O'Gorman Hammer is still the zealous, domineering director of Philadelphia's Grand Opera Company (the world's only woman opera-director since Anita Colombo was eased out of her position at La Scala) but in five years her position has radically changed. No longer does she haggle over prices or stitch costumes. She wears orchids, travels abroad to engage talent. Prosperity came in 1929 when Mrs. Mary Louise Curtis Bok, daughter of Publisher Cyrus Herman Kotzschmar Curtis, decided to support the company, to use it partly as an outlet for opera talent in the Curtis Institute of Music. Proof of the company's security and artistic prestige is to be had in its plans for a new $6,000,000 opera house, in this season's prospectus: Twenty operas have been announced, among them such ambitious undertakings as Richard Strauss's Elektra (scheduled for its first time this week) and Alban Berg's Wozzeck.* Famed Contralto Margaret Matzenauer will be one of this year's singers. Conductors will be Fritz Reiner, Eugene Goossens, Alberto Bimboni, high-priced Leopold Stokowski.

* Wozzeck will be given by the Philadelphians in Manhattan Nov. 24. At its U. S. premiere in Philadelphia last year many a critic pronounced it the most important opera since Pelleas et Melisande. It tells a sordid tale of murder done a woman who preferred a swaggering drum-major to a downtrodden, pasty-faced soldier. Composer Berg's score is as powerful as it is radical.

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