Songstress in Trousers

To bustling little Director Laszlo Halasz, the late Richard Strauss's opera Der Rosenkavalier looked like a natural for his New York City Opera Co. Its conversational style, he thought, was ideally suited to his City Center opera house.

Furthermore, Strauss was box office, as Halasz had proved with Salome and Ariadne auf Naxos. And, best of all, he had just the cast to sing the opera. Last week, Der Rosenkavalier' s first City Opera Co. performance proved Director Halasz exactly right.

First-nighters (among them: the Metropolitan Opera's General Manager Edward Johnson, some of his staff and stars) started right out applauding H. A. Condell's first-act scenery: his baroque boudoir, hung with Rubensian nudes, could hardly have been more apt. The Marschallin's monologue, sung by Vienna State Opera Star Maria Reining, had them clapping again. But the brightest successes were two U.S.-born girls. One was Virginia Haskins (Sophie), a pert, tiny soprano who made her first hits in the Chicago Opera Co. and on Broadway in Carousel. The other was a shy upstate New Yorker named Frances Bible, who brought boyish poise and brilliant singing to the role of Octavian.

Singing Octavian, the Marschallin's unripe lover, was not 27-year-old Contralto Bible's first operatic excursion in trousers: last year, she made the same kind of hit in her hurried debut as Cherubino in the City Center's fine production of Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro. But she is beginning to hope it may be her last. She has sung the role of Lola in Cavalleria Rusticana and Mercedes in Carmen, but feels that she still has to prove that she can also sing in skirts.

Born in the Lake Ontario village of Sacketts Harbor, N.Y. (pop. 1,900), Frances first started singing in the village church choir. After high school, and some singing lessons in nearby Watertown, she auditioned at Manhattan's Juilliard Graduate School, won a fellowship, graduated with the highest singing rating in her class. When she sang in audition for Laszlo Halasz last year, he broke his usual routine of saying just "Thank you" to hopeful auditioners, and signed her on the spot.

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