Return Engagement

It was the custom at the Turin Royal Theater to keep the electric lights burning in the house so that the audience could follow their scores and see to eat their box lunches. But for the first performance of La Boheme, young (28), bristle-haired Conductor Arturo Toscanini ordered the house lights turned out. Further, he instructed his Mimi (Soprano Cesira Ferrani) to stay in character once she started to succumb to consumption in Rodolfo's drafty garret in Act IV; there would be no rolling around in the creaky bed for encores.

Despite some indignation over this devotion to Composer Giacomo Puccini's realism of plot and tender score, the first performance of La Boheme was a success. The critics aloofly condemned Puccini for writing down to the mob. But there were 15 curtain calls. The great Giuseppe Verdi was notably absent, but Pietro (Cavalleria Rusticana) Mascagni and Ruggiero (Pagliacci) Leoncavallo, sitting in boxes, led the cheering. Tall, droop-mustached Giacomo Puccini, 37, tearfully embraced Toscanini. La Boheme, a work with a realistic human story,* has been one of the most popular operas ever since.

In Manhattan last Sunday, in NBC's streamlined, salmon-pink studio 8H, little, white-haired Arturo Toscanini, 78, celebrated the soth anniversary of that night in Turin by conducting La Boheme's first two acts on the air. He scheduled the last two acts for the following Sunday.

This time the world's greatest conductor, of opera or anything else, put on a Boheme without costumes or scenery, and with no box lunches in the studio audience. He lined up his cast of soloists (mostly Met stars) before the mikes like an old-fashioned singing class, so that he could keep a sharp eye and a firm baton on them. Tenor Jan Peerce, in the first act's duet with Soprano Licia Albanese, closed on a lower E (as Puccini wrote it) instead of the flashier high C he likes to exit on at the Met. Surprise star of the show was Toscanini's 20-year-old soprano find, Anne Me Knight (TIME, Jan. 28).

It was easily the best performance of La Boheme the U.S. has heard since Toscanini last conducted it at the Met in 1910. After it was over, Toscanini waved hastily to the shouting audience and scurried off, leaving the applause for the singers and his late friend, Puccini.

* From Murger's novel Scenes de la Vie de Boheme.

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