Sweet notes

PITTS SANBORN

Pen portraits of Mmes. Jeritza, Bori, Ponselle, Pons and Moore of Metropolitan Opera renown

The annals of the prima donna are as full of plots and persecutions as the lives of the saints. Note the Nemesis that dogged Mme. Emma Eames throughout her public career (we have to take her written word for it). Though the woman is never named, no one can fail to recognize that Nemesis as the late Nellie Melba, who recently died, to all appearances unrepentant or unaware of the sinister role allotted her by her confrere. Or read the catty remarks of an earlier American soprano, Clara Louise Kellogg, about her contralto colleague, Annie Louise Cary. Remember how the illustrious Schroeder-Devrient, impersonating Romeo, mercilessly tickled the feet of Mme. Rudersdorff, his Juliet, with a feather, as she lay supposedly unconscious upon her bier. . . . Even under the disciplinary rule of Gatti-Casazza himself, there have been rumors of temperament and tantrums off-stage. And yet, as compared with other days, before the prima donna had become a full-fledged business woman, prompt at rehearsals and always within reach of the telephone, the Metropolitan household is now an abode of contentment, co-operation, and sunny tranquillity.

A part of this beneficent radiance is shed by that blonde and towering soprano, Maria Jeritza, of Vienna. To be sure, an occasional cloudlet, no larger than a man's hand, dims the flood of light that moves beside her like a tide. Once she disliked the way Mr. Gigli treated her in a performance of Tosca, so she spoke her mind to the audience. "Mr. Gigli is not nice to me," she calmly announced before the curtain. She has never sung with that admired tenor since. Then, sometimes her courageous acrobatics land her in a hospital for a few days, or, riding undaunted into a mob scene, she suffers a wooden sword thrust in the solar plexus. Yet, as a rule, sunshine and laughter companion her steps. And the gladsome song of the box office makes a merry obligato to her joys and tribulations of the mimic scene.

It is safe to say that no artist, however gifted, could reach a Jeritzan pinnacle of fame without plenty of hard work. Her musical studies belong to her early youth. It is not necessary to go into them now, further than to point out that Mme. Jeritza, upon her own admission, is thoroughly grounded in the theory and the art of musical composition, and is also perfectly competent to conduct an orchestra. That prime essential, her effulgent health, she has preserved through adherence to a strict regimen. In the winter, while she is busy with her art, she finds Swedish gymnastics helpful, as well as two baths a day. In the summer she takes long walks, she rides horseback, she swims, she climbs mountains. The result is that she sleeps like a child, and never suffers from so much as a headache. She is moderation itself in the matter of eating and drinking, and she happens, fortunately, to loathe tobacco.

All summer she leads the most active sort of outdoor life at her country home at Unterach in Upper Austria, -where she and her husband, the Baron Leopold von Popper of Vienna (who brings her to New York every autumn and fetches her every spring), habitually spend their holidays. It was in this region of lakes and mountains that Mme. Jeritza's career received a big impetus, thanks to the interest of no less a dignitary than the old Emperor Francis Joseph. The Emperor habitually summered at Ischl. One year Maria Jeritza happened to be the star of a light opera troupe that was summering there also, and on a fateful evening His Majesty dropped in to hear Die Fledermaus, in which the young soprano was singing Rosalind. He was so delighted with her performance that he demanded to know from his Intendant why this captivating creature with the enchanting voice had never been engaged for the Court Opera.

"Is it necessary," he asked, "that all the singers of my Court company must be ugly and advanced in years?"

The answer, as might be suspected, was a quick negative, and it was not long before Mme. Jeritza emerged on the Court stage of Vienna as the heroine of Oberleithner's Aphrodite. She has continued to adorn that stage in spite of her seasonal visits to such capitals as Berlin, Paris, London, and New York. Incidentally, the imperial favor bestowed upon the fair-haired diva by the old emperor was graciously continued by his nephew and successor, the Emperor Karl, and now that the empire of the Hapsburgs is no more, Mme. Jeritza names herself among the godmothers who have cared for Karl's son and heir, Otto, the young Pretender to the vacant throne of Hungary.

If the Metropolitan troupe has its Austrian baroness, it also has its veritable hidalga, a lady of high degree from the ancient city of Valencia in Spain. This lady has long been known to the world, and always to New York, as Lucrezia Bori, but the Spanish name to which she was born is Borja and the name bestowed upon her in baptism is Lucrecia. When she began her operatic career in Italy the accidental change of one letter Italianized her Christian name into Lucrezia, which influenced her to prefer Bori to Borgia, the style that was assumed by her sixteenth century kinsfolk, Pope Alexander VI and his notorious son and daughter, Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia. "Those were so wicked people, those Borgias. I no like that," "our" Lucrezia has been reported as saying. (Can it be that she is skeptical about the latter-day whitewashing of Cesare and the other Lucrezia?) But Miss Bori requires no Papal kinship to establish her standing as a Catholic, and an aristocrat, as her family has been known in Valencia for centuries; and from the late Spanish sovereign she wears the order not only of Alfonso XII, but also of Isabella la Catolica.

Miss Bori has never been married; but she was, to her father, the most devoted of daughters until his recent death, as she is now a devoted sister to a brother who is not only her inseparable companion, but whom she regards as one of the shrewdest and most exacting critics of her art. That art seems somehow so much a part of her nature that one hardly thinks of it as a product of labor at all. None the less, Miss Bori has been an indefatigable worker, and if one wants proof of her natural and acquired musicianship, one has only to learn that in South America she mastered the part of Margharita in Mefistofele in less than twenty-four hours and proceeded to sing it without a prompter, to the complete satisfaction of the Maestro Toscanini, who, in addition to his normal intransigeance as a conductor, was suffering tortures at the time from rheumatism.

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Lily Pons, the newest soprano star in the Metropolitan constellation, is a young lady difficult to classify. A native of Cannes, the daughter of a French father, she has ample right to regard herself as French; though her mother is Italian and so, some would insist, the donor of the daughter's voice. Her husband is a Dutchman from The Hague. Engaged by Mr. Gatti-Casazza to sing florid parts, just as Miss Marion Talley had been before her, Mme. Pons made her American debut at the Metropolitan's first Saturday matinee of the present year without any preliminary trumpeting, in quite the contrary manner of the clamorous Talley-ho that had preceded, and for a time followed, the invasion of opera by the youthful diva from Kansas City. The wisdom of this procedure was quickly proven. In the name part of Lucia di Lammermoor, once sacred here to Melba, Sembrich, and Tetrazzini, this slim, unknown singer aroused a packed house to a tremendous pitch of surprised and delighted enthusiasm, from which there has since been no let-down, and which has attended her resounding triumphs at the Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires. And Mme. Pons, whose European career of a brief three years had been passed in provincial cities of France, found herself within a span of scarcely more than six months a reigning prima donna in the premier opera houses of the New World.

Since the days of Nordica and Eames, American singers have held conspicuous positions in the Metropolitan Opera Company. So it is natural enough that two sopranos of American birth should today be among the chief displays in Mr. GattiCasazza's operatic show window, viz. Rosa Ponselle and Grace Moore. Miss Ponselle, whose family name is really Ponzillo, was born of Neapolitan parents at Meriden, Connecticut. Miss Moore is a native of Tennessee.

Miss Ponselle's father conducts a coal business in Meriden. She herself is the youngest of three children. Her sister Carmela, a mezzo-soprano, is also an opera singer, and her brother Antonio possesses a tenor voice, in spite of which asset he has preferred the hazards of driving a coal wagon to the uncertainties of a musical career. The family, when the children were young, had little money, and Rosa at one time was glad to sing for her supper in cabarets. In 1915 she came to New York with Carmela, who applied to Gene Hughes, a vaudeville agent of the time, for a job. While her try-out was going on Rosa Ponselle walked into the room.

"She sings a little, too," said Carmela.

"Then maybe we could make a team of you," answered Hughes. He heard the sisters, and immediately engaged them at the neat figure of $125 a week. They were a success from the start, and before long found themselves headliners at a salary of $600 a week. It was then that William Thomer, who had once been a handyman for the de Reszkes and was now teaching singing, heard them. He was so impressed with Rosa's voice that he took her to sing for Caruso.

"This girl is a Neapolitan," Thomer said by way of introduction. "She looks just like you, and when you hear her you'll be crazy about her."

When Caruso heard her, he said at once: "The first thing you must do is to sing La Forza del Destino with me." Thus it was that without other stage experience than her seasons in vaudeville, and possessed of a repertory of just one part, Miss Ponselle made a Metropolitan debut in 1918, that has now become historic.

Miss Ponselle was a queen of variety before she took up the sceptre of grand opera, but Miss Moore entered that august realm through the portal of musical comedy in Irving Berlin's Music Box Revue. But even before the days of Hitchy Koo and Up in the Clouds, she had sung in the choir of the Baptist Church in her native town of Jellicoe, Tennessee, and had stepped over the border into Kentucky and seen the rude bar-rooms of its eastern mountains. Returning to Baptist Jellicoe, the young girl toyed with the idea of becoming a missionary, not in Kentucky, however, but China, which for some time had been the country of her apostolic dreams. But this was not to be, as music proved stronge than missions. While a student a Ward Belmont College she was look ing forward toward the day when sh could devote all her time to singing She went to Washington to train he voice, and presently appeared success fully in concert with Giovanni Mar tinelli of the Metropolitan. Furthe study in Paris, and then the practica experience in musical comedy follower for "this hard-working American girl before, on February 7, 1928, she too the most important step toward th fulfilment of her operatic ambition b emerging at the Metropolitan Oper House as Mimi in La Boheme.

Short as her operatic career ha been, this blond and lithe sopran with the eyes of corn-flower blue, already a prima donna de luxe. He "first editions" are famous and s are her Toulouse-Lautrecs, her froc and her jewels.

Her latest professional activity en braces the movies, where she has bee seen as Jenny Lind in A Lady's Mora and as co-star with Lawrence Tibbe in The New Moon. She is an advoca of full-length opera on the screen. believe," she says, "that motion pi tures are the biggest force in develo ing a love for good music in t masses, and it is my opinion th picture-goers would enjoy such oper as Louise and Romeo et Juliette."

Grace Moore may or may not ha proved a better business woman th her fellow prime donne of the Giulit fold, for beyond a doubt, since t days of the Baptist choir, she h d~ne well for herself. Her adoption the singing-screen is unique for pr ent Metropolitan sopranos. Will t day come when Mmes. Jeritza, Bo Pons, and Ponselle will follow h lead? So far, we watchers of the ly skies can only guess.