Impresario's Anniversary

A pageant which many a New Yorker thought never to see repeated was given this week for the 50th time. The Metropolitan Opera House shed the dingy warehouse look which it wears through the summers. Lights from the marquees flooded the surrounding sidewalks. Limousines drove up in lines to where flashlight photographers waited to see if the passengers were important enough to "shoot." In another line, earnest men and women drably dressed waited anxiously to get standing place behind the red plush rail inside, to see the faded gold curtains open on the beginning of another winter's opera.

Into one of the building's obscure back entrances that evening, hulking, bearded Manager Giulio Gatti-Casazza walked slowly, tiredly. He followed a narrow, twisting corridor to a door marked PRIVATE, went in, hung up his big, loose overcoat, his black, broad-brimmed felt hat. He was early, but at the opening performance there was never any telling when a call might come for Mr. Gatti to calm some backstage confusion. Gatti had been early for 24 other opening nights. His contract has three years to run. But if this 25th opening night should be his last it would not do to break his record. The curtain call sounded and since it was the season's opening Mr. Gatti left his office, where he could have heard the opera through a wooden cylinder contraption attached to his desk, and took a chair in the wings. It was a battered, straight-backed office chair, squeezed into space twice too small for his massive frame, but there he had sat and seen great Enrico Caruso enact the bearded Jew in Halevy's La Juive, the last performance Caruso ever gave. There he sat the night plump little Marcella Sembrich sang her farewell; the night Geraldine Farrar first appeared as the ragged goosegirl in Die Koenigskinder, surrounded by a flock of live geese which she insisted on having against all other judgment; the night golden-haired Maria Jeritza gave her first breath-taking performance of Tosca and astounded New Yorkers by singing the Vissi d' arte lying flat on the stage; the night Marion Talley made her debut with a delegation from Kansas City to ballyhoo her placid, immature performance; the night Antonio Scotti, celebrating his 25th anniversary at the Metropolitan, received as tribute a brace of pigeons hidden in a great basket of flowers. . . .

From his chair in the wings this week Mr. Gatti watched Baritone Lawrence Tibbett impersonate Simone Boccanegra, a 14th Century doge whose life was thoroughly cluttered with political intrigues, kidnappings, poisonings. The audience, Mr. Gatti knew, would make little effort to follow the complicated plot. The few powerful, cumulative moments in the music would not make up for the lack of familiar, fetching tunes. But Simone Boccanegra suited Mr. Gatti for the season's opening opera. His hero Verdi wrote it. It is spectacular. The first act might be slow but at least the scene in the big council chamber would be impressive, where Tibbett stills a riot and sets a curse on his hunchbacked henchman in a manner worthy of great Feodor Chaliapin.

The first-act curtain went down. Box-holders got out their glasses to scrutinize their neighbors and their neighbors' costumes. But it was of little account to Mr. Gatti whether ladies were going gloved or ungloved this season. He did not inspect the Diamond Horseshoe to see that Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt was sitting in Box 3, a ribbon around her head as usual, or that old Mrs. Vanderbilt was missing from Box 31. Gatti kept his tradition in the wings until the last intermission. Then, hands in his pockets and whistling faintly, he returned to his office where Board Chairman Paul Drennan Cravath went, escorting Dancer Ruth Page, to wish him good evening; where Conductor Arturo Toscanini, his long-estranged friend with whom he was reconciled last spring, came from the less-fashionable second tier boxes to sit closeted with him until long after the opera was ended.

The financial crisis which the Metropolitan ran up against last year (TIME, May 30) set Gatti to thinking that perhaps 25 years is long enough for a man to manage a great opera company. Most impresarios do well to keep their jobs for three or four years. Gatti for 21 years made opera performances pay for themselves while presenting the world's greatest singers in a widely varied repertoire. He even set by $1,000,000 which helped through the first two years of Depression. Last winter when that was gone Gatti had been forced to announce his predicament. No fat-pursed patron came forward. He appealed to the singers to forget their existing contracts, to save the company by taking a second drastic pay cut. His plea was eloquent: "When a house is on fire one does not send for lawyers or notaries. . . ."

All the artists except Tenor Beniamino Gigli voluntarily lowered their pay. Gatti cut his own to $22,500. The 1932-33 season was cut from 24 to 16 weeks. Seat prices were lowered. The Company reorganized as a membership association to escape taxes. But with all his efforts Gatti got more criticism than praise. Many people called him oldfashioned, reactionary. They blamed him for reviving ancient operas like Simone Boccanegra and ignoring modern debatable works. Some people suddenly objected because he did not speak English, a pose he has purposely maintained. Some accused him of slighting U. S. singers. To start this season Gatti has $500,000 worth of subscriptions, $150,000 in small guarantees from members of the newly formed Association. It may or may not see him through the winter. He has added three new operas to the repertoire: Rossini's Il Signor Bruschino, Strauss's Elektra and The Emperor Jones which Composer Louis Gruenberg has based on Eugene O'Neill's play. He will present eleven new singers: Soprano Frida Leider, Contralto Maria Olszewska, Tenor Tito Schipa and Baritone Richard Bonelli from the disbanded Chicago Civic Opera Company; Tenor Gustaaf De Loor and Bass-Baritone Ludwig Hofmann who will fill out the German wing; Norwegian Soprano Eide Norena; and four young Americans-- Tenor Richard Crooks, Sopranos Helen Gleason and Margaret Halstead, Contralto Rose Bampton. Margaret Halstead, who makes her debut as Venus in Tannhaeuser this week, was taken into the company to please Board Chairman Cravath, a friend of her father, Consul General Albert Halstead who used to be in London. Gatti was not overjoyed. But he took on more than one singer whom the former chairman, Otto Hermann Kahn, wanted to help. One young singer more or less is probably a matter of complete indifference to Gatti this year when singers come cheap. Gatti is far more interested in the fact that Louis Eckstein, generous patron and able impresario of opera at Chicago's Ravinia Park, has been ejected to the board of directors, in the fact that the lease on the historic old house expires in May, in his own indefinite future.

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