Prima Donnas

In the 1910s, when shapely, grey-eyed Geraldine Farrar was the most shimmering star of Manhattan's Metropolitan, operatic prima donnas were the world's most galumptious glamor girls. In 1922, before her cult had time to die, 40-year-old Soprano Farrar retired from the operatic stage to live a secluded life on a Connecticut farm. Last week she published her autobiography,* a curiously constructed narrative half of which is written in the third person as though seen through the eyes of Soprano Farrar's deceased mother.

The daughter of "Syd" Farrar, who played first base for the old Phillies, Geraldine was born in the little town of Melrose, Mass. In Manhattan, where she went to study, she was offered a chance to sing small parts at the Metropolitan. But Soprano Farrar wanted a big chance; she refused, went to Europe to continue her studies. At 19 she was already an admired figure in European opera. At the Metropolitan, when she returned famous, she rubbed arias for 16 consecutive seasons with such famed songsters as the late Enrico Caruso and Antonio Scotti, she sang some 29 roles, played the most famous of them, Madame Butterfly, nearly 100 times in Manhattan alone.

Less of a glamor girl, more of a conscientious craftswoman, is 1938-model Prima Donna Lotte Lehmann, who last month also published an autobiography./- Though overshadowed in the public eye by the more spectacular Kirsten Flagstad, German-born Soprano Lehmann has, for five years, been rated tops by Metropolitan opera connoisseurs.

A plump, homey individual, as different from Soprano Farrar as Pilsener is from champagne, Soprano Lehmann writes much better. The daughter of a small town bookkeeper who wanted her to be come a respectable stenographer or school teacher, Lotte Lehmann made a very gradual climb to stardom, worked her way laboriously through bit parts at second-rank German opera houses. It was not until the London Covent Garden season of 1923 that she won international fame. But once won, that fame stuck like well-swabbed glue.

Today, Soprano Lehmann, who acquired three Jewish stepsons by a marriage to a Viennese army officer, is a voluntary exile from her native Germany, and has applied for U. S. citizenship. To her, one of the most impressive things in the U. S. is the U. S. drugstore, where she can buy not only drugs, but milkshakes ''which are very bad for my figure."

*Such Sweet Compulsion--Greystone Press ($3).

/-Midway in My Song--Bobbs Merrill ($3).

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