Soprano from Spokane

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The curtains parted on the second act of La Boheme: the square outside the Cafe Momus, in Paris' Latin Quarter. A colorful crowd, self-conscious and unconvincingly hearty as most opera-players pretending to be real people, swarmed over the stage. The poet Rodolfo strolled in happily with his sweetheart Mimi, but his painter friend Marcello was in the dumps, and sang (in Italian): "Bring me an order of poison." He had just heard the jaunty voice of his faithless Musetta, who soon flounced in, all feathers and finery:

As through the streets I wander onward merrily, See how the folks look round, Because they know I'm charming, A very charming girl. And then 'tis mine to mark the hidden longing And all the passion in their eyes; And then the joy of conquest overcomes me-- Every man is my prize!

At Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House one afternoon last week, sparkling young Soprano Patrice Munsel warbled those waltz-time lines as if they had been written for her. When the curtain closed on the act, operagoers gave her an ovation. Backstage in her dressing room, Patrice Munsel grinned happily. Said she: "I love an audience!"

No Three-Ton Tanks. Patrice has loved audiences ever since she was twelve, when she played to her first one in Spokane, Wash. But it took her 13 hard years to make the love affair mutual. Last season she fairly stole the show as the saucy maid Adele in Fledermaus. Her flashing Musetta last week--her first time in the role--proved that she has reached the top of her operatic class. General Manager Rudolf Bing, a man who likes understatement, calls her a "superb soubrette--probably without competition at the moment."

At 26, slim but full-figured, Patrice Munsel is typical of a new kind of grand-opera star--as un-European, as American, as Ethel Merman or Mary Martin.* In European opera, with its polished Viennese, its lyric but undisciplined Italians, its meticulous Germans, there is nothing quite like her.

And--a fact that greatly pleases U.S. operagoers--she represents a new trend in opera. As Conductor Tibor Kozma says: "Operagoers no longer will stand for three-ton tanks in the roles of innocent 15-year-old girls, or singers who stand in front of the prompter's box and do their daily dozen. They want acting. They want dramatic realism. Munsel and some others are representatives of a young generation of singers who are really singing actors." Patrice's manager, Sol Hurok, says with box-office candor: "You can listen with your eyes open."

Impresario Hurok, whose eyes are seldom shut, has a more-than-esthetic interest in Miss Munsel. Eight years ago, listening at his radio one afternoon to the Met Auditions of the Air, he heard 17-year-old Patrice singing coloratura arpeggios in a voice as full of rills as a country brook, and lustily topping off high Fs. It was not the greatest voice he had ever heard, but coloraturas were scarce, particularly with Lily Pons, the Met's coloratura queen, making herself scarcer on wartime tours. Hurok went to see Patrice, and liked what he saw--a confident, warm-eyed girl with black, wavy hair and a brilliant smile.

The Met offered her $85 a week. In addition to that, Hurok guaranteed her $40,000 a year from concerts and radio for three years. Some of his fellow concert managers thought the shrewd old boy must be cracking up. But a year later, Patrice grossed--from radio, records and concerts -- $150,000.

Whistling Is an Art. Patrice Munsel is almost, but not quite, her real name. Patricia Beverly Munsil was the only child of a successful Spokane dentist and an accomplished pianist who wanted Pat to be musical too. "Up until the time I was five," says Patrice, "I suppose I led a perfectly normal life. But then I started to study whistling." Why? "I had a good pucker, I guess."

Pat studied whistling for seven years with a Spokane whistling teacher, Mrs. Marjorie Clark Kennedy, to whom whistling is an art, "not a parlor trick." Pat was a conscientious student. Says Mrs. Kennedy: she "could have had a real career in whistling if she'd kept on. She did beautiful bird work; her chirps were sure and fine. She was especially good on the meadow lark."

But Teacher Kennedy could not have loved whistling so much, loved she not music more. It was she herself who suggested turning the pucker towards Puccini. One day she said to Pat's mother: "Eunice, this child has a God-given voice. She should give up whistling and study voice." Twelve-year-old Pat was willing, provided she could keep up other activities that interested her. These included playing football (she once tackled a boy on the concrete sidewalk and broke his collarbone), baseball (two stitches in her forehead after being hit with a bat), and careening down Shoshone Place on her bike, no hands. But she settled down to her voice lessons. She wanted an audience. In a whistling recital, she had discovered her true love: "I enjoyed being onstage in front of all those people. I had a wonderful time."

15-c-, Even Money. A small touring opera company came to Spokane that spring. Pat got a job in the chorus for the performances of Cavalleria Rusticana, Pagliacci and Carmen. The San Carlo Opera Company also came to town that year, and Pat and a friend named Mary Jo Williams heard Madame Butterfly. Pat solemnly bet her girl friend 15-c- she would some day sing at the Met (she has never collected).

By her second year in high school, her parents were beginning to wonder whether her singing was good enough to justify full-time study. Conductor Vladimir Bakaleinikoff, now musical adviser of the Pittsburgh Symphony, listened and said yes. So her mother took her to New York, and there they went to see a voice teacher named William Herman. Teacher Herman listened to Pat, looked her over once, then summed her up like a judge at a stock show: "Wide face, straight back, well-developed torso, flexible figure, great thoracic swing, long tongue, high-arched palate, proportion of vocal cords to resonators almost ideal." Then he sat her down for some hard words.

"He told me I had a wonderful voice, but then lots of young people did. The singing profession was a nasty business in many ways, and unless I wanted to put in years of hard work, I would get nowhere. If I did get anywhere, a career was often a heartbreaking thing."

Pat took two lessons a day with Herman for ten days, then went home to Spokane to ponder what she was getting into. Three months later, her mind made up, she moved to New York with her mother.

Teacher Herman had seen that Patrice had the makings of a coloratura--the aerial acrobat among singers.* Her voice was a little heavier than the usual coloratura's but it was clear and agile, with a strong F at the top. Moreover, she was the right physical type: energetic and quick-moving, and her voice "trilled and bounced, zinged and bubbled even when she talked." Herman's program for her, six days a week: a voice lesson from 10:30 to noon; operatic coaching, 1 to 3; Italian lesson, 3 to 4; French lesson, 4 to 5; another voice lesson, 5 to 6. He also gave her a list of reading in history and literature, and arranged for her to take fencing ("Nothing like it for stance and poise"). Three years and thousands of lessons later, she was ready to try out for the Met Auditions of the Air.

Champagne in the Daytime. The day her chance came, Patrice was dressed in saddle shoes, ankle socks, sweater and skirt, and heavy glasses (she is very nearsighted), and her long black hair was a tangled mass. There was no time to change; she crammed on a cloche hat and went as she was.

While Met Conductor Wilfred Pelletier watched her from the control booth, she sang the Mad Scene from Lucia di Lammermoor. When she finished, he asked her to take off her hat and glasses so he could get a better look at her. After two more arias, Patrice was voted straight into the auditions. Before the winners were officially announced a month later, Patrice and her mother were invited to Conductor Pelletier's apartment. Says Pat: "He served champagne, and when I drank champagne in the daytime, I knew something had happened."

Are You Ready? Patrice's debut on Dec. 4, 1943 was an event that neither General Manager Edward Johnson nor Patrice herself will soon forget. She was cast as the bravura coloratura Philene in Mignon, with Rise Stevens as Mignon and James Melton as Wilhelm Meister; Sir Thomas Beecham was in the pit. The Times's Olin Downes stormed next day: "She was cruelly miscast in . . . one of the most exacting roles in the coloratura soprano's repertory. Her performance was not at Metropolitan standards ; . . She is comely and has charm. She has flexibility and range. But the voice will have to be treated very carefully, and [she] will find it advisable to go slow before imposing upon it burdens which . . . can bring her disaster instead of ultimate success."

Who was responsible for putting an unripe 18-year-old on the Met stage--one of the youngest singers ever to make a Met debut?* Teacher Herman admits that "it all got a bit out of hand." But "it's like studying medicine and then hanging out your shingle. Are you ready? There is so much still to learn, but if you don't start that day, you never start. I've decided that you are ready for any occupation when people are ready to pay you for it."

Says Patrice herself: "The critics didn't tell me to go home, and I was thankful for that."

Ready or Not. Manager Hurok's reaction to the bad news was to raise her fee from $2,000 a concert to $2,500. And in the fall, after a summer concert tour, Patrice was back at the Met. She sang Lucia, and Rosina in Barber of Seville. After their first broadside, the critics paid little attention to her. Thanks to public demand, which Manager Hurok did nothing to discourage, Patrice was kept gainfully busy.

But the Met audience was her true love, and it began to look as if this too-young bridesmaid of the Met was never to be a bride. The next two seasons, she sang Juliette in a voice that glittered in the coloratura passages but was thin and forced in the big dramatic moments. Her first Lakme, the classic role for coloraturas, was capable but uninspired, and left most listeners wishing for Lily Pons.

This critical chill, and the toll that radio and concerts took from her, began to sap Patrice's morale. She almost began to doubt whether she had picked the right career. Perhaps she should have stayed in Spokane and married her old sweetheart, after all. Teacher Herman's first hard words came back: "Even if you do get anywhere, a career is often a heartbreaking thing . . ." At the age of 21, the prodigy was a veteran who was beginning to feel perilously like a failure.

She took to breaking training--"picking up my bobby pins, running to Grand Central and getting on a train." Most often she went to New Haven, where she had a boy friend named Johnny Johnson. He and his three roommates sometimes sneaked Patrice into their dormitory room, where she 'would study with them. Johnson thought she had "one of the keenest uneducated minds I know."

In Manhattan, she went dancing until 3 a.m. She became a fight fan, and yelled with the crowd (particularly for Rocky Graziano) in smoky Madison Square Garden. Her career slipped from bad to worse. RCA Victor said nothing about renewing her recording contract; the radio demand for her voice began to fade. The wise guys of the music business shook their heads. Patrice, was just one more prodigy who couldn't grow up.

First Laugh. Pat has made them all eat their words. She decided that, though "growing up in public was no fun," she would have to do it. And she did.

The upswing began when she was talked into singing Victor Herbert's Naughty Marietta in Pittsburgh in the summer of 1949. Something happened there that changed her career overnight: she got her first laugh. And, says she: "The first time you step out onstage and get a big yak, you're lost for the rest of your life."

A summer week of laughs gave her enough confidence that fall to try a role at the Met that Edward Johnson, whose faith in Patrice never wavered, always thought she could do: the country maid Zerlina in Mozart's Don Giovanni. Pretty as a picture, and gaily outmaneuvering the lecherous Don, she made the critics and audiences sit up. Having discovered what was good for her, the next summer she talked herself into the cast of a West Coast Rose Marie, and worked hard on her comedy timing and spoken lines. By then she had discovered that she was "an incurable ham." In the winter, she was ready to run away with Fledermaus ("You wouldn't think you could have that much fun at the Met").

Now that she has established herself as the Met's ranking soubrette, Patrice's work is pretty well cut out for her. This season, in addition to eight Adeles in Fledermaus and three Musettas in Boheme, she will get a coveted role in the Met's new, English-language production of Mozart's Cosi Fan Tutte, as Despina the maid, who decoys her mistresses into affairs with two rich Albanians, masquerades as a quack physician, and generally moves the whole plot around.

If Patrice has any big worry left about her career, it is that she may get too many soubrette roles. She knows that her voice has not enough weight, dramatic color and power for such heavyweight parts as Aida, but some day she would like a try at such lyric roles as the consumptive courtesan Violetta in La Tramata, or the heart-wrecker, Manon. Bing has promised her a Mimi (the consumptive heroine of Boheme) next month.

Actually, Bing himself does not intend to limit Patrice to soubrette roles; for one thing, there are not many in the repertory. But he thinks that "she should do things that are light in vein, not necessarily light in quality, but cheerful and scintillating. She is a cheerful personality; she makes people feel cheerful."

Mink for the Throat. Now that she has become a successful madcap onstage, she is a more serious character when she is off. But she is still passionately fond of fishing and sailing, and runs off to the country whenever she can. Her life in Manhattan is an exacting round of lessons, rehearsals, fittings and photographs. She conscientiously answers her mail, and seldom" fails to get off a cheery quarterly letter to the Princess Patter, a mimeographed magazine published by her teen-age fan club (Bing Crosby, Shirley Temple, Rise Stevens, Jan Peerce are honorary members).

She seldom goes to nightclubs now, because the smoky air hurts her voice. Her idea of a big night is a steak and a movie with one of several beaux (current favorite: Candy Heir Robert Schuler). She insists that she has "no plans" for marriage, but admits that "I don't want to end up with only a book of clippings."

At parties, her friends seldom ask her to sing, but if Sinatra or Crosby happens to be mooing on the radio, she is apt to chime in with a corned-up accompaniment. Back in Victor's good graces again, she has recorded some popular songs.

She lives well, if not on the scale of leopard-skin luxury of some more fabulous divas of the past. Home is a roomy duplex apartment off Manhattan's Park Avenue, where her mother lives with her as companion, housekeeper and secretary. Patrice dresses well but not lavishly, and if she has a weakness for finery, it comes out at the furriers. Her wardrobe includes two mink coats, a mink cape and stole, a nutria coat, an ermine wrap, and a spare mink skin "to keep my throat warm."

Stairway on A. At the Met, she is a cheerful favorite among singers as well as stagehands. Says Jennie, the Met's tantrum-tested wardrobe boss: "She's regular." She is also a hard worker and a serious student. She has to learn her roles letter-perfect, and for a good reason: "I'm as blind as a bat." Without her glasses, she can hardly see either the prompter or the conductor. Conductors like her because she is quick, clever and agreeable, "no prima donna in temperament."

With stage directors, she has the same serious, hard-working approach. Garson Kanin, who directed Fledermaus, suggested that a splendid effect could be achieved if Pat could hold an A while climbing a flight of steps, ending it dramatically as she reached a balcony. Oh no, said Pat, "that would be practically impossible." But when Kanin arrived for rehearsal next day, he found her standing at the foot of the steps, biting her lip and concentrating. Then she ran up the stairs, high-noting it all the way. She doubted whether she could do the same thing in costume and with props (a long pole, and a bowl of fruit on her head). But by dress rehearsal, she had succeeded. Says Kanin: "It was an electrifying experience."

How Good? Rudolf Bing is in the business of producing electrifying experiences. And that requires "singers who can perform in the modern theater." In the old days, a fine voice was usually enough. The Tetrazzinis and Rethbergs took a solid stance, opened their golden throats, and sang. Operagoers still demand, and get, fine voices, but most of them have now been conditioned by Broadway and Hollywood to demand something more: good-looking, cleanly directed and well-rehearsed casts. So the Met scouts keep hunting for all-round performers. Some of their latest diva-debutantes:

ROBERTA PETERS, who comes from The Bronx, and, like Patrice Munsel, studies with William Herman. A chirrupy young (21) soprano and a born actress, she made a surprise hit as Zerlina in Don Giovanni last year. Sopranos Peters and Munsel are mutual admirers: Roberta keeps a scrapbook on Patrice, and Patrice, who often sits through Roberta's lessons, admiringly pronounces Roberta "great."

MILDRED MILLER, sprightly, Cleveland-born soprano, who made her Met debut as Cherubino in Mozart's Marriage of Figaro a fortnight ago.

HILDE GUEDEN, Vienna-trained soprano, who made her Met debut a fortnight ago as the girlish Gilda in Rigoletto, and will sing her first Rosalinda in Fledermaus this week, with Patrice as Adele.

ELENA NIKOLAIDI, Greek contralto, who also got her seasoning in Vienna, and made an opening-night hit as Amneris in Aida.

For Patrice herself, the future could hardly look brighter. Says Boss Bing: "If Munsel accepts the fact that she has a specific role to fill at the Metropolitan, and fills it as brilliantly as I have every belief she will, I would think about reviving operas that have good roles for her." And Europe still presents a challenge. Four years ago she went on a concert tour of Scandinavia, but she has yet to sing opera abroad. Europe will not think her a beauty. One European musician describes her thus: "Fairly tall, slender, and has a pleasant horse face, like a clean-cut American college girl." And Europe has heard better voices. But everyone likes life--and Patrice Munsel has a lot of that. Among other things, she would like to try her Fledermaus Adele--in German--on the Viennese.

She also has one warm eye on television. At first she was wary: "I televised like a plate of worms." Since then she has learned how to make up. She has done several operatic bits on TV, and recently had herself a good time alongside Milton Berle, whose art she candidly admires. After her TV bits, people all over town, including the doorman at her apartment-hotel, tell her they caught the show. "Where else," asks Patrice Munsel, "can you get an audience quite like that?"

* Patrice was offered the role of Nellie Forbush in South Pacific when Mary Martin left the show, but turned it down because she would have had to sing it for a year. She also turned down a lead in Broadway's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, "because I didn't want to scrub floors for a year." * Nonmusicians define a coloratura voice as one that plays musical chairs among all the right notes without ever sitting down. * Marion Talley was five months younger when she made her debut as Gilda.

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