Debutantes' Thrills

While socialites donned their stuffed shirts and tiaras for the opening sessions of Manhattan's new opera season (see above), five of the season's 14 singer-debutantes lathered themselves with greasepaint for their first appearances on the Western Hemisphere's most celebrated stage. To dowdy singers who have already appeared on other famous stages, debuts still rate second only to the Christian sacraments.

Before the opening performance buxom Neapolitan Soprano Maria Caniglia was found crawling about the Met's splintery stage in search of bent nails. Reason: An old Neapolitan superstition that bent nails mean luck. She found a half dozen, toted them about with her while she sang the part of Desdemona in the season's opener, Otello. Thus equipped, Soprano Caniglia sang lustily, was lustily choked in the last act by Tenor Giovanni Martinelli (Otello) who finally covered her face with a pillow. The performance over, she had the ecstatic satisfaction (see cut) of being smothered again by flowers in her dressing room.

The second debutant, German Baritone Hans Hermann Nissen, with a traditional lock of property hair over his left eye like a well-bred Scottie, stalked woodenly as Wotan in Die Walkuere. Judges gave him several points on power, few on subtlety. Two Italian sopranos were broken in on Puccini's sway-backed war horse La Boheme: Mafalda Favero who moped placidly as the tuberculous Mimi, and Marisa Morel who flounced her skirts and shrilled nervously as Musetta.

One debutant gave thrills to the audience as well as to himself: stocky honey-voiced Swedish Tenor Jussi Bjoerling who had appeared three times previously with the Chicago Opera. Since 1932, when famed Tenor Beniamino Gigli was painfully extracted after a tiff over a salary cut, the Metropolitan had been chewing its tenor arias with bare gums. Thirty years ago when the Met had Caruso, Bonci and Slezak, Tenor Bjoerling would have been as superfluous as a wisdom tooth. But as the French poet Rodolfo in La Boheme, Swede Bjoerling took his top notes in the best Italian manner. His hearers chortled as if they had never heard his like before.

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