Covent Garden

When a Londoner hears the words "Covent Garden" he thinks of 1) vegetables, 2) opera. For Great Britain's largest garden-produce market and Great Britain's Royal Opera House lie within a stone's throw of each other on the fringe of London's fashionable West End. And both institutions have the same name. Historically, the vegetables got there first, for the name Covent Garden derives from an old convent garden which occupied the site in the days of many-wived King Henry VIII. Centuries later, in 1732, one John Rich built a theatre where the Royal Opera House now stands. In it appeared such famous Shakespearean actors as Charles Kemble, Edmund Kean, Charles Macready, Fanny Kemble. In it German

Composer George Frederic Handel gave the first performance of his Messiah, most popular oratorio of all time. The present opera house dates from 1858.

Last week fashionable Londoners gathered at their Royal Opera House to witness the most pretentious annual event of London's musical life: the opening of the spring opera season (seven weeks) at Covent Garden. As in past seasons, the roster of singers included several names familiar to audiences at Manhattan's Metropolitan, among them Lotte Lehmann, Kerstin Thorborg and Lauritz Melchior. Season's repertory, as at the Metropolitan, showed a distinct accent on German opera, with two complete cycles of Wagner's Ring des Nibelungen as its main feature. Whipping performances into shape were a staff of internationally famed conductors, including Germany's Wilhelm Furtwangler, Austria's Erich Kleiber, Italy's Vittorio Gui.

Most indispensable of these whippers-into-shape, however, was a bouncing, imperial-bearded British oldster, Sir Thomas Beecham, who has for many years served as Covent Garden's artistic director, England's No. 1 maestro (and one of the six or seven most eminent in the world), Conductor Beecham has been conducting opera and furiously fostering operatic activity for nearly a generation. He has lost fortunes on it, has fed it generously to hungry audiences and stuffed it down less eager throats. A pioneer in presenting new works, he has given Britishers their first taste of more new operas (including most of Richard Strauss's stage works) than anyone of his generation. Today he is regarded by his fellow Londoners as the soul of Covent Garden.

Born in 1879, son DEGof a wealthy British pill manufacturer (Beecham's Pills: "Worth a Guinea a Box"), hearty Sir Thomas got an early start waving a baton over orchestras and operatic casts. In 1906 he founded the New Symphony Orchestra (now the Royal Albert Hall Orchestra), and in the next three years doggedly conducted a series of Queen's Hall concerts despite discouragingly small public response. In 1911 he was instrumental in bringing the Imperial Russian Ballet to London, two years later combined it with a season of Russian opera. Many English composers had him to thank for rare performances of their works; among them blind Frederick Delius (A Village Romeo and Juliet, TIME, Jan. 24).

Exuberant Sir Thomas can usually be counted on to pull a rabbit of some sort out of his hat. This season's rabbit: an unknown, good-looking, 26-year-old,Polish-born soprano named Margaret Kubatzki. Soprano Kubatzki, making her official Covent Garden debut in a role previously sung by the eminent Kirsten Flagstad (Senta in Wagner's The Flying Dutch-man), created a sensation. Said Conductor Beecham: "One night last October I was turning the various knobs of a wireless ... I heard a magnificent voice. . . . When I went to Germany to make records of the Magic Flute I enquired of every eminent German musician I met as to what he knew about Kubatzki. None of them even knew the name. I rang up every opera house in Germany until I found her at Leipzig. She came up and sang to me in Berlin. After she had sung ten bars it was quite clear that here was the most promising singer of her type since Destinn. She ought to be one day the greatest Bruennhilde and Isolde of her generation."

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