Debuts

Talk of a big new opera company buzzed louder and clearer in Manhattan last week than any of the many opera rumors of the past year. Soprano Maria Jeritza and Tenor Beniamino Gigli, both out of the Metropolitan this year, were two names connected with it. Richard Strauss, the story went, would be one of its conductors, Fritz Reiner another. Max Reinhardt, Ernst Lubitsch and Robert Edmond Jones would stage its productions in up-to-date fashion. Youthful members of Society would be called upon for support instead of the staid and settled folk who sit in the boxes at the Metropolitan Opera House. Would this be the opera company to establish itself in Rockefeller Center? That was the question which no one would answer. But everyone knows that a great hole is waiting there for an opera house which in turn is waiting for a worthy producing company.

Meanwhile last week the Metropolitan pitched debuts like quoits, one or more every night:

Rose Bampton, a comely, full-voiced contralto from Buffalo, sang Laura in La Gioconda on the company's first Tuesday-night trip to Philadelphia. In Philadelphia Contralto Bampton had many friends to applaud her, to fill her dressing room with flowers. In Philadelphia she studied and often performed with the Curtis Institute of Music and the affiliated Philadelphia Grand Opera Company.

Tenor Tito Schipa, who sang leading roles with the Chicago Civic Opera Company until it disbanded last spring (TIME, July 4), appeared in L'Elisir d'Amore as the timid rustic who gets tipsy on a love potion taken to help him win the village belle. Schipa was not so slapstick in the role as Tenor Gigli, whom he is replacing. His voice is lighter. But he sings Italian arias with the old-fashioned sentiment which the galleries adore.

Gustaf De Loor, a new Dutch tenor, and Ludwig Hofmann, a German bass-baritone, sang in Die Goetterdaemmerung. Tenor De Loor gave a stodgy, dark-toned impersonation of Wagner's youthful Siegfried. Hofmann's Hagen might have seemed deeply sinister if mighty Michael Bohnen had not sung the same role so recently, in the same black cape, the same black-winged helmet.

Helen Gleason, a sprightly New Yorker with a bright little voice, looked odd in the _ shepherdess costumes and mulatto makeup which Bersi the maid wears in Andrea Chenier.

Margaret Halstead's debut aroused more curiosity than the others. Few operagoers had heard of her until the Metropolitan announced a few weeks ago that it had engaged her. Then it became generally known that she was a protegee of Board Chairman Paul Drennan Cravath. that her grandfather was Murat Halstead. Cincinnati journalist famed among other things for having witnessed and vividly described the hanging of John Brown at Harper's Ferry. Margaret Halstead's father, friend of Lawyer Cravath, was until recently U. S. Consul General in London. His strapping soprano daughter was a nervous, inexperienced siren as Venus in Tannhaeuser last week, but she sang the difficult music accurately, often beautifully. Critics who might have deplored her lack of experience put her down instead as a promising young singer who in time might become an asset big in drawing power as well as body.

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