Gatti Announces

Last week Director Giulio Gatti-Casazza of the Metropolitan Opera Company talked to the press. Behind his broad, shiny desk in Manhattan he told about four operas; three new singers.

The operas: Turandot, to open the season Oct. 31, with Maria Jeritza & Giacomo Lauri-Volpi; Korngold's Violanta, the first novelty, also with Jeritza, Nov. 5; on the same afternoon, Hansel und Gretel; Gioconda, to open the Philadelphia season Nov. 1, with Rosa Ponselle & Beniamino Gigli.

The new singers were Dorothee Manski, lyric soprano of the Berlin Staatsoper; Everett Marshall, U. S. baritone, and Grace Moore.

The last name caused reporters to query anxiously, scribble hastily. "Not the Grace Moore who sang in Irving Berlin's Music Box Revue, in Hitchy-Koo, in Up in the Clouds?" It was that same pretty girl, native of Jellicoe, Tenn., one-time music student at the Wilson-Green School at Chevy Chase. She had fled classroom and the First Baptist choir for the snapping footlights of Manhattan. George M. Cohan, alert actor-producer-play-wright, gave her audience & advice. The advice was to go into musical comedy. There, a Southern drawl, an arch manner and a pure voice carried her to the top of the musical stardom, to join the All-American Grand Opera Company in France. Now her cycle returns to Manhattan.