Mr. Kahn & Mr. Gatti

At four o'clock of a dull afternoon last month, a Lincoln motor ear waited outside the office door of the Metropolitan Opera House, Manhattan. Some nondescript fellows who were arriving in twos and threes at the same door glanced at their watches and then, nervously, at the big car where it crouched beside the curb, glittering in the grey air as if its glass and brass and nickel work were lit with a secret sunlight. For whom was it waiting?

The fellows may have been apprehensive because they were excited. Each of them had found on his desk that morning a slim slip: "Mr. Giulio Gatti-Casazzaf Manager of the Metropolitan Opera, Company, will see the musical reporters on Monday afternoon at four o'clock in his office."

Once a year, just before the season begins, Manager Gatti issues his summons so that he can answer at a single sitting the plaguing interrogations of the press. New operas are to be given, new singers heard; Manager Gatti-Casazza had promised to give details. Yet the reporters, when they had got inside, found that there was nothing for them to do but stand fidgeting on a green carpet; Mr. Gatti-Casazza was busy. When at length an interpreter (for Mr. Gatti-Casazza understands English but slowly and speaks it more slowly still) led them down a corridor to his office, one reporter hung behind, then dashed to a window and peered down just in time to see the door of the big car close behind a dapper, short and quick-moving man in a derby hat.

The reporter bit his fingernails. He was wondering whether he would best serve his paper by following the others into Manager Gatti's office or by pursuing the little man in the automobile--a little man who, chief stockholder, President, guarantor and presiding intelligence, knows perhaps more than anyone else about the Metropolitan Opera Company and its new season.

Otto H. Kahn. In the tonneau of his limousine Otto Hermann Kahn (if the reporter had not made a mistake) settled himself for whatever reflections were his at that hour of an autumn afternoon. He might have thought, for a cigar puff or two, of widely separated and irrelevant things--of the year he served in the German Army in the early eighties--;-of what Roosevelt once said of him*--of the fact that his son, Roger Wolff Kahn, has organized a very successful jazz orchestra--of the respectful way in which the press is beginning to call him "America's Foremost Patron of tre Arts." Or he might have thought, not without satisfaction, of the banking career whose compact pattern knits these scattered salients. Formerly cashier in a bank in Carlsruhe, Germany, later Vice President of a German bank in London, he came to the U.S. during the panic of 1893, took a job as clerk, and in a few years was helping E. H. Harriman rehabilitate the Union Pacific.

A curious fellowship, that with Harriman: suave diplomacy and Harriman's sledgehammering; an appreciator of art and thunderous Harriman, who knew railroads and wanted to know nothing else. It was an alliance of race antagonisms: the reserved and brilliant Jew; the bristling, aggressive, fiery-hearted Yankee. He did not have much time for patronage of art in those days. He was too busy to hear as much music as he wanted to; in fact, he nearly forgot how to play the violin--an accomplishment he learned when a schoolboy in the Duchy of Baden. Those schooldays were some 40 years ago, but he remembers "the feeling of lordly superiority" that exalted him when he went to a performance of Tristan und Isolde and sat next an elderly man who nodded, put his head down, and then actually snored. More and more, as a rich man, he has experienced the feeling that the public should certainly be helped to a better appreciation of music.

No reflection could cheat him of the satisfaction of doing his duty in that cause. He has poured out innumerable pamphlets, composed in long and eloquent sentences; he has made speeches whenever he was asked, contributed to many orchestras, operas, schools, movements. "I look for high achievements," he has said; in the Metropolitan, largely through the efforts of a onetime naval cadet, he has found them.

Giulio Gatti-Casazza rose from his desk to receive the reporters. His face was stern; he sat down again like a judge. Notebooks snapped out. He began to read in rolling Italian from a long docket that lay on his blotter. The stiffness of his large burly body, of his voice, of his Risorgimento mustachio, reaffirmed that touch of the military that had been so evident in his written summons. Possibly this martial rigor is an inheritance, for Manager Gatti-Casazza's father, Senator Stefano Gatti-Casazza, wore a red shirt with Garibaldi; more probably it is the consequence of the years he spent learning the art of navigation in the Naval College at Genoa. He might have grown up to the glory of gold braid; instead he cut classes to go to the Carlo Felice and the Politeanna.*

Verdi was his idol. When he had left the Naval College and gone to study opera in Bologna, he took an apartment in the palazzo where the composer lived. He would sit in his rooms and peer at Verdi's windows with a pair of field glasses. The servants, thinking him a rude person, pulled down the blinds. Once he met Verdi in the hall, took off his hat, opened the door for him. Angered by this innocent mummery. Verdi pushed past and strode off, muttering. . . . "Long afterward," said Gatti, "he told me that at my age I should have been following a pretty woman instead of a grey-haired musician."

His father made him director of a musical theatre in Ferrara; after five years there he went to La Scala. He brought Caruso to fame, discovered Chaliapin in Russia. When the Metropolitan Opera House was built to supplant the tottering Academy of Music ("The Old Yellow Brewery on Broadway"), he came to the U. S. to be its Manager.

Men seldom reap ease by changing their professions. To command an Italian man-of-war would have been a sinecure compared to the business that occupies him now-- a business that involves 80 principal artists, a chorus of nearly 300, an orchestra of 120, 12 assistant conductors, a ballet of 80 and 700 miscellaneous stagehands, ticket takers, officeworkers, wire-pullers. Each season 4 millions is taken in by the box office. Each season Manager Gatti-Casazza goes to probe in Europe for new operas, new singers. It was about some of these that he read so sonorously to the pressmen while kindly Mr. William Guard, interpreter, translated his words, sentence by sentence.

"The Metropolitan Opera House will open on Monday evening, Nov. 2, with a performance of Ponchielli's La Gioconda with Rosa Ponselle, Jeanne Gordon, Beniamino Gigli. . . .

"During the first week two 'novelties' will be given in a double bill LHeure Espagnole by Maurice Ravel, with Lucrezia Bori; followed by Der Barbier von Bagdad by Peter Cornelius. . . . During the second week the first Metropolitan performance will be given of Gasparo Spontini's opera, La Vestale."

The German critic popped up with a question--would there be no Wagner the opening week?

"Non," said Gatti-Casazza.

Q.--"Is the Metropolitan the greatest opera house in the world?"

A. (translated)--"I cannot say. You are the critic. You ought to know."

Q.--"Are the artists of the Metropolitan better than the artists in European opera houses?"

A.--"I don't know. They are the best available."

Q.--"Have you heard any works of importance abroad?"

A.--"I attend only to what happens here. ..."

Then the rolling voice went on to tell about certain new singers:

Lawitz Melchior, Danish tenor, six feet high. Once his voice was baritone, but like Jean de Reszke's, it grew higher-He will sing Wagnerian roles.

Carmela Ponselle, a mezzo-soprano whose vaudeville career was cut short when a critic discovered that her sister Rosa, with whom she was training in the two-a-day, had "the greatest dramatic-soprano voice in the world."

Dorothea Fisher, Pennsylvania-Dutch soprano from Allentown, Pa.

Marion Talley (TIME, Oct. 19), 18-year-old prodigy from Kansas City.

The musical reporters bustled away to tap out the ideas that had come to them while they listened to the Manager Gatti's rolling syllables. The fact that he has engaged fewer new singers than ever before is inevitable, they pointed out; he has most of the good ones now. But significant is the fact that in the thin receiving-line of operatic debutantes there are three Americans. This is Manager Gatti-Casazza's second answer to the drone of those who protest that the Metropolitan ignores native talent. His first--a remark made last year--was: "Find me an American Caruso, bring me the score of a U. S. Meistersinger."

Last week President Otto H. Kahn made his own answer in a 24-page pamphlet. Said he:

"The Metropolitan Opera Company does not believe itself called upon to lower its standards for the sake of proving its 'Americanism.'"

Cosmopolite, metropolite, he conceives the function of the company to be the giving of opera in the best possible manner. This is also the conception of Manager Gatti-Casazza; their consultations are cooperative, for where Mr. Kahn's Lincoln-waits--there waits harmony.

The Box Holders. As feudal barons clung to their castles and patents of nobility, so the elect of Manhattan's social register cling to the boxes of the Metropolitan. This year Box 31 and Box 35 will be empty when the opening curtain rises upon Giaconda. Not seeing Mrs. Vanderbilt in 31, operagoers will recall the recent death of her son, Reginald C. Vanderbilt. And J. P. Morgan's absence from Box 35 will recall to many that Mrs. Morgan died last July.

In Box 19, however, Judge and Mrs. Elbert H. Gary will be remarked as newcomers. For years they have attended the Metropolitan's opening night in the Iselin box (15). Now they have purchased Box 19 from the estate of Harry C. Frick. At them steelworkers in the topmost gallery will proudly point.

-*"The soundest economic thinking in this country at this time is being done by Mr. Kahn."

*Operatic theatres of Genoa.

*Also he rides in a Rolls-Royce.