The Mero-lrion

The only woman opera impresario in the world last week launched the freshest, most bumptious U.S. opera troupe on its second Manhattan season. The impresario is Hungarian-born Yolanda Mero-lrion of the youthful New Opera Company. For openers, Impresario Irion chose The Opera Cloak, Walter Damrosch's latest one-acter, and The Fair at Sorochinsk, a rollicking opus by Russia's rum-nosed Immortal, Modeste Moussorgsky. Eighty-year-old Composer Damrosch conducted his curtain raiser without drowning out the audience's spirited conversation. But for The Fair at Sorochinsk, they sat up, shut up and pounded their palms with joy.

Manhattan critics agreed that the New Opera Company had done a better job with The Fair at Sorochinsk than the venerable Metropolitan does.

Next day the New Opera's 100-odd youthful singers turned to polishing up their coming offerings: Offenbach's La Vie Parisienne, Verdi's Macbeth, Tchaikovsky's Pique Dame. They raised Steinway Hall's roof with incessant rehearsals. They were out to prove, once & for all, that opera does not have to be sung by middle-aged tenors and bulging contraltos. Between arias, they hotly argued this revolutionary' idea over hamburgers and milk in the 57th Street Automat. To the participants the New Opera is more than opera: it is a crusade. They came from all over the U.S., Canada, Mexico, even Hawaii, picked by audition from thousands of young singers who have applied for a chance to prove that they could sing big-time opera if only they can get a lift or two on the way to stardom.

Dynamo that turns this enthusiasm into operatic production is intense, thickset, greying Yolanda Mero-lrion, wife of Hermann Irion, a Steinway Piano Co. executive, now a Washington dollar-a-year man. Impresario Irion first came to the U.S. in 1909 as a well-known concert pianist. After touring the world on a piano stool for 20 years, she settled down on her husband's estate in Rockland County, N.Y. During the depression Yolanda Irion discovered that 60% of unemployed musicians were singers. With wealthy Socialite Mrs. Lytle Hull, Mrs. Irion outlined a plan which would 1) put singers to work, 2) provide inexperienced U.S. operatic artists with a much-needed steppingstone to the Metropolitan. Mrs. Hull put up the money. Mrs. Irion organized the singers and musicians. Last year the New Opera Company was born.

Today, Mrs. Hull still foots a good part of the New Opera Company's budget. But broad-faced Yolanda Mero-lrion runs the show. She makes the final choices for the casts from scores of names selected by the Company's Board of Auditions. She decides which operas the Company will perform, picks its conductors, artistic and stage directors, ballet masters and coaches.

She chooses her singers for looks and intelligence, puts them through their paces with iron discipline, fires them for the slightest laxity or sign of flagging interest. Yolanda Mero-lrion takes personal credit or blame for every move her 100 singers. 90 musicians and 20-odd conductors and technical executives make. Says she, in her Magyar-tinged English: "Only one cook can spoil this broth. I have to do everything myself." So far, critics agree, Impresario Irion has spoiled nothing.

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