Milanov of the Met

The New York Herald Tribune's caustic composer-critic Virgil Thomson went all out last week. He had just heard, he wrote, a voice "with a beauty that is unmatched among the sopranos of this country." The accolade went not to one of the seven singers making their debuts this season, but to bosomy Yugoslav Zinka Milanov, singing Donna Anna in Mozart's Don Giovanni for about the 20th time. Just five days earlier, another Trib critic had panned her. Wrote he: "[Her] decrease in avoirdupois [has] brought with it a disturbing lessening of her powers. . . ."

Such critical contradictions are an old familiar song to green-eyed, red-haired (dyed), 38-year-old Mme. Milanov, who for seven seasons has been the Met's most up-&-down performer. When she is good, she is very good; when she is bad, she is quite bad -- and often she is both in the same evening. Her full-blown voice, rich and dark in the lower tones, sometimes climbs to an unsteady tremolo. As confused by her critics as they are by her, Milanov says : "You try to do your best to please the public, please critics, please everybody. Then you lose weight and they don't like you. What you do? You get bugs in the head." Milanov used to weigh over 200 Ibs., but has lost 50 of them, largely by daily rides on an electric bicycle in her apartment overlooking Central Park. She still eats as many steaks as she can find, and cooks two hearty Yugoslav dishes -- sarma (stuffed cabbage) and burek (meat and onion, wrapped in thin dough). Says she: "To look at me I still have plenty of flesh." When she made her debut in Yugoslavia at 19, she could sing only in Croatian. When Bruno Walter discovered her in Vienna, she had also learned to sing in German. Walter introduced her to Toscanini, who chose her to sing Verdi's Requiem at Salzburg in 1937. The Met brought her to the U.S. three months later. She knew neither Italian nor English. After ten harried weeks with an Italian tutor, she made her Met debut in Il Trovatore. Now she is the Met's first choice in such Italian operas as Aida, La Gioconda, La Forza del Destino and Norma. Of Norma, Mme. Milanov says proudly: "To sing it a woman must have had very big experience in life."

Her husband, Predrag Milanov, returned last month to Yugoslavia, where he will translate, then direct and act in Angel Street and Tobacco Road, at the state-owned Zagreb Theater. His wife, remaining here, will become a U.S. citizen in 1946. Says she: "When you come to America you get independent like American women."

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