Shortage at La Scala

Milan's La Scala has been going for 171 years. And for most of that time it has been one of the world's greatest opera houses. Its audiences had heard premieres of the operas of Donizetti, Bellini, Rossini, Meyerbeer, Verdi, Puccini. The greatest singers--Patti, Melba, Caruso, Chaliapin, Gigli--all graced its stage. From 1921 to 1929, under Arturo Toscanini, La Scala seemed to have reached a golden plateau. But last week even the proudest Milanese were admitting that something was very wrong with their great opera house.

The trouble was the singers. As La Scala's great Conductor Victor de Sabata put it: "In the old days we picked our singers; now we take what the impresarios have to offer." And with such Italian singers as Ezio Pinza, Salvatore Baccaloni, Italo Tajo, Licia Albanese and the Tagliavinis lured to greener U.S. pastures, Italian impresarios did not have much to offer.

On opening night last month a glamorous audience paid up to $25 a seat to hear La Boheme. The performance was doomed from the start. Derisive whistles greeted the tenor's vain struggles for the high notes. After the soprano's first-act aria, a critic cracked: "They call me Mimi, but my name is Bruennhilde."

But last week La Scala Manager Antonio Ghiringhelli brought someone else in. For the season's first performance of Bellini's I Puritani, a Milanese favorite, Manager Ghiringhelli brought back U.S. Tenor Eugene Conley, for whom I Puritani was revived last season. When another singer sang flat in the first act, the audience groaned. But by the time Tenor Conley topped off the difficult third-act duet with a ringing D-flat above high C, audience and critics alike got off their hands.

Naturally, not everybody was happy. Grumbled one oldtimer: "It takes an American to come here and show us again how a tenor should sing."

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