Met's Youngest

With a bit of shamrock pinned underneath her dress and a little flat prayer book in the sole of her slipper, Mary Elisabeth Moore, a 21-year-old New Yorker, made her debut last week as the youngest member of Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera Company. It was not the occasion she had hoped for. In February she was to have been the heroine of Verdi's Rigoletto. But laryngitis interfered. Her debut, instead, was at a Sunday night concert. Her biggest test: the Mad Scene from Lucia in which an exacting flute kept tabs on her trills and cadenzas.

Mary Moore was nervous but she clutched her chiffon handkerchief and met the test bravely. Her voice is small but it is smooth, appealing. Unlike many a coloratura she was faithful to pitch throughout the laciest passages, took her top notes truly. In appearance the Met's youngest singer is as Irish as her ancestors who, she says, "were kings and poets and all." Her father is an employe of Anaconda Van Service. An uncle, Joseph Eustace, who encouraged her from the start, works for the New York City Government.

The late Billy Guard, the Metropolitan's kindly pressagent, gave Mary Moore her first glimpse of opera when she was 14. Because she wanted so much to be a singer and because he was Irish, too, he gave her free passes, persuaded his friend Edythe Magee to teach her. Her only public appearance before her debut last week was with an obscure opera company in Baltimore in 1933.

Mary Moore's manner is consistently naive. When she had her audition with Manager Giulio Gatti-Casazza last spring, she was so excited that she sang with a cough drop in her mouth. Then she made a novena to Saint Gabriel and Saint Paul. ("But I haven't said much about that because I don't want people to think I go to church just because I want things.'') She practices in a studio because at home she is afraid of annoying the neighbors. When she makes an exception she closes all the windows, stuffs rugs under the doors.

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