Last Song

New lustre pervaded the gilded interior of the Scala Theatre, in Milan, last week, reminiscent. It was the occasion of the premiere of Turandot, posthumous opera of Giacomo Puccini, presented as he left it 17 months ago, unfinished. Critics, managers, connoisseurs the world over took the pilgrimage to Milan, hopefully, fearfully. Would Turandot be of the stuff of which La Boheme was made, La Tosca, Madame Butterfly--melodious, lovely, appealing, human above all operatic ingredients, or would it savor more of The Girl of the Golden West, of the later tryptich,* pappy, dull?

They were rather slow to commit themselves, those who went. They were awed by the solemnity of the occasion, by the magnificence of Toscanini's production. It was not pappy, they said, not dull. Nor yet had it the characteristics of Boheme. It seemed rather not to be like Puccini at all. It was spectacular, Chinese with a decidedly Italian flavor, the story of a beautiful, cruel princess, chaste as a buttercup, up for marriage to the one who succeeds in unraveling three riddles she propounds. The Prince of Persia comes, dares to try, to risk his head if he should fail, guesses right. But Turandot, poor in sporting blood, will not give in, causes a slave girl to die for not disclosing the Prince's identity, holds herself stubborn, until the Prince's kiss tells her that his name is Love.

The performance at the Scala last week ended with the death of Liu, the slave girl, the first scene in the last act, at which point Toscanini turned to the audience, said: "The composer worked until this point and then died." It seemed uncanny to the audience that it should have ended with the slave girl's aria, the one big bit of unaffected melody. They waited eagerly to hear the ending written by Puccini's friend, Franco Alfano, from Puccini's notes, with which the Scala company is already prepared. They commended, meanwhile, the superb Turandot of Rosa Raisa, the creditable Prince of Miguel Fleta, the attractive, winning Liu of Maria Zamboni.

Modern

In a British laboratory a white-haired savant bent, over a microscope, lifted a sad, tired face to the glare of a high-powered electric lamp, sighed. He plunged his hands deep into his dressing-gown pockets, sighed again. He was Dr. Faust, despondent, wanting to die, preparing the poison. In came an uninvited guest, no conventional red-tighted devil, but Monsieur Mephistopheles, sleek, well-groomed, bemonocled, his only tail the double portion of conventional evening dress.

So opened the "Faust in Modern Dress" as presented last week by the Grand Opera Society in London. No liberties had been taken with the plot that Gounod chose from the first part of Goethe s tragedy. Mephistopheles made Faust live on, enticed him with promises of pleasures, with visions of fair Marguerite, restored him to youth. There were the same choral festivities with students, soldiers, peasants and burghers, the same stout Valentine, who dies in the attempt to avenge his sister's honor. Marguerite spun her stint, disported herself with jewels and flowers, repulsed Faust, then yielded. The prison scene was the same--a repentant maiden condemned for infanticide, the tortured offender dragged relentlessly away by Mephistopheles, and Marguerite carried away high into the sky by white, white angels.

All this was the same. But Valentine wore no medieval armor last week in London. He wore instead the uniform of the Royal Air Force. There were laborers in 1926 overalls, and five-pound notes slapped out by Mephistonheles. And in the community festivities men and girls were strangely alike, wore tennis flannels, plus fours and shingled bobs.

Critics and Faustophiles flocked to the performance, found it a travesty, to be sure, but not wholly irreverent. One of them regretted that Faust had not thought to use a fountain pen, that Mephistopheles had not thought of a monkey gland operation; commended, nevertheless, the Opera Society's enterprise; prophesied a profitable run.

New Song

Irving Berlin once worked as a waiter in Nigger Mike's, an East Manhattan saloon. His talent was schooled by the clink and shuffle of a nickelodeon. Critics have often pointed meaningly to this fact saying that a man who could emerge from such a background with an equipment as fine as Mr. Berlin's--lacking perhaps the sophistication of George Gershwin, the light-foot fantasy of Jerome Kern, but authentic and interesting nevertheless--must be indeed a genius. So the phrase"Words and Music by Irving Berlin" has come to mean certain things to the U. S. public, and critics have seldom stopped to ask what relation the words bear to the song, and whether Mr. Berlin's verses are, like his songs, original, arresting, pat.

Last week, "At Peace with the World and You" was played in Manhattan, a new song which purported to be the third of the series inspired by the composer's romance with the daughter of the President of the Postal Telegraph Company. The words follow:

The day is done--the golden sun Is sinking behind the blue, And on its way it seems to say I'm glad that my work is through. Night is drawing near, Stars will soon appear. Buildings are beginning to light up their windows. And as for me--I'm glad to be At peace with the world and you.

Chorus

I love to spend the evening At peace with the world and you; A cozy room--a comfortable chair. And never a care-- As long as you're there, The day may have its worries. For skies are not always blue-- But when the day has flown, How sweet to be alone. At peace with the world in the evening with you.

The tune, which orchestras will play all spring, and phonograph records will spill into long summer evenings, and which, in the autumn, the hand-organs will trundle through the streets to burial merits no description. And the words--like the words of "All Alone", like the words of "Remember", like the words of all Mr. Berlin's songs except, possibly "I'm a K. P."--are exactly the words one would expect a waiter in Nigger Mike's Cafe to write, in a trickly moment, on a beer-stained menu, behind the nickelodeon.

Dead March

Since the days of the early Greeks, dead men have been paraded through the streets to the beat-beat of grim monotones as final as the death that has taken them.

Drums have rumbled, reeds have cried out, humanly, despairingly. Great composers have vied with one another to create a greater monotone, a more ecstatic emancipation. Handel wrote the Dead March from Saul, wove three heavy, hollow notes into an overpowering pessimism. Beethoven breathed Death into one of his greatest sonatas. Chopin, infinitely sad, reflected first his own consumptive depression, forgot himself in the glory of his music, became animated, triumphant. Wagner killed his Siegfried, and the dusk of the gods fell upon the earth, covered it with a mighty gloom, through which a thousand reminiscences of a guileless youth failed to penetrate. And mourners now, desiring to bury their little men with pomp and circumstance beyond their own conception, borrow from their betters, lead their processions slowly, laboriously, to the measured throbbing of despair.

Famed for their funeral corteges are the Italians. Men, women, children join in, take steps as long sustained, as unvaried as the strains to which they march. Women move even more slowly than men, decided the authorities at Campi Salentino** recently, and observed that when they were pallbearers, the streets were blocked for hours and traffic made impossible. They should be pallbearers no more, that much was decided, and last week action was taken against music, like the Dead March from Saul, conducive to such a crawling pace. Snappier music, ordered the cathedral chapter, which has charge of the local ceremonies, and the Campi Salentino band leader, more progressive than his fellows, conceived a brighter theme in slow jazz. Outraged at the cathedral's "effrontery," at the band leader's "flippancy," the townspeople put their heads together, held council, planned an immediate appeal to Rome; in the meantime went on parading their griefs at the same tedious tempo.

*Il Tabarro, Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi.

**Small town in Southern Italy.