Jeritza Confesses

"Why should an artist wait until her career is ended to write her reminiscences?" cries Maria Jeritza* on the first page of her memoirs./- She has answered the question by publishing them in midcareer. Her book is chock-full of merry notes, and will be greedily devoured by lovers of personal chit-chat about beautiful and important people. There is the story of the strong-man Graff 1, who played Ursus in the opera Quo Vadis, and had to hold the prima donna in his arms for ten minutes at a time. "But oh," wails Jeritza, "how many times did I wish he were holding a sack of flour instead of myself! He had muscles like ridged steel. Resting on them was about as comfortable as lying on a pile of steel bars. I used to dread that fourth act like a trip to the dentist." There was also Leo Slezak, who "is very stout; 'I always like to work with you,' he often told me, 'because you are so thin I can actually embrace you on the stage when an embrace is in order. I cannot embrace stout prime donne very well, because I am so fat myself!' " Elsewhere there is this wise remark, "You cannot make an opera audience believe that a man will en-'danger his soul, and commit robbery and murder for a very stout lady's sake." The fine old figure of the Emperor Franz Josef flits through a large section of the book, together with many crowned and titled European celebrities and our own Roosevelt. At Ischl, Jeritza sang before the Emperor, in Johann Strauss's Die Fledermaus. "How he applauded! In the second act I sang the very brilliant Czardas, with its fiery, passionate frischka dance close. When I ended the Emperor clapped and did not stop until I sang the number a second time. Then we--he and I--repeated the performance; he applauded and I sang. But when he insisted on my singing the Czardas a fourth time--I could not get a single note out." Crowned heads of the world's musical aristocracy are not lacking. There is Caruso, whom the diva kissed; Richard Strauss and Puccini, her intimate friends; Franz Schreker, whose music she loathes ("His stories are morbid and unhealthy; his scores, vocally, are the most terrible ever written") ; Geraldine Farrar, whom she generously admires; Gatti-Casazza, Frances Alda, Marcella Sembrich her teacher, "strict, and, when I sometimes gave her occasion, stern." The choicest bits are the naive little confessions. "The jewels I wear on the stage are all imitation." ... "I might as well state categorically that my hair, all of it, is absolutely my own and grows naturally instead of being applique. Naturally, I exclude from this claim the wigs I wear in my stage impersonations." ... "I love movement, and am capable of turning a few hand springs in the strict privacy of my drawing-room, an accomplishment probably not included in every prima donna repertoire. It always rouses my friends to shrieks of laughter to see me do this, but thus far I have found none of them able to follow my lead." "Wearing the knee breeches of Octavian (a boy's part in Der Rosenkavalier) as they should be worn, worried me ... I am the farthest removed from being 'mannish' that a woman possibly could be. I practiced standing and sitting and moving about in my knee breeches, and walked miles in my room before I reached the point of being able to forget that I was wearing them." The majority of casual readers will find the book worth having just for the sake of the six-and-twenty most ravishing photographs of its statuesque authoress, in all her important roles, which her publishers have wisely included.

d'Alvarez Boasts

Jeritza's memoirs will probably seem extremely pale and tame to those who have been following the autobiography of Prima Donna Marguerite d'Alvarez in the Sunday Magazine of The New York World. Marguerite's title alone sounds the compelling keynote: The Men Who Have Loved Me. The list includes old King Leopold of Belgium (the singer had to protect herself against the kingly, but naughty, advances by using her hatpin) ; Oscar Hammerstein, famed impresario; Edmond Picard, French jurist and poet; and a real, genuine, blown-in-the-glass Sheik.

"Greatest Enthusiasm"

Miss Marj-Lewis of Little Rock sang in Ziegfeld's Follies for 1920, 1921 and 1922. During 1923 she studied in Vienna and was acclaimed by certain Viennese critics as "greater than Jer-itza." Last week she appeared in Tales of Hoffmann at His Majesty's Theatre in London when sudden illness prevented the appearance of Maggie Teyte (British National Opera Company). Said the British critics: "She aroused the greatest enthusiasm."

Music of the Locomotive

Serge Kousseyitzky, who comes to conduct the" Boston Symphony in the Autumn (TIME, Sept. 17), electrified Paris by a performance at the Opera of M. Arthur Honegger's symphonic movement called Pacific (231}--a musical glorification of the modern American locomotive. Reports have it that Honegger, who is one of Eric Satie's famed "Group of Six" modernists, passionately loves locomotives. To him they are living beings, especially the big ones, like Pacific (231), which draw heavy loads at high speeds. The composition, while it does not imitate the noise of the machine, attempts to make audible the spirit of the monster of the steel roadway, and thereby to reflect the tremendous dash and energy of modern life. One critic described the effect as follows: "It opens with the slow and majestic pulsation of the engine. Then the movement, like the speed of the train, accelerates until it becomes a thunderous trepidation. Then it reaches the lyrical state, the pathetic solitude of a train of 300 tons launched in the dead of night at 100 miles an hour. Then with gradually decreasing power the movement slows down, the brakes subdue all this dynamism, the monster triumphantly arrives on a broad and sumptuous tune."

* Maria Jeritza was born in 1891 at Brunn (then part of Austria). Lively, vivacious, blonde and big, she appeared in operettas at Munich in 1911. In 1912 she went to the Vienna Opera House. She is married to an Austrian count--von Popper by name.

/-SUNLIGHT AND SONG--Maria Jeritza-- Appleton ($3.00).