American Opera

President Coolidge was there. So were Mrs. Coolidge, Mr. & Mrs. Frank Waterman Stearns, the British Ambassador & Lady Isabella Howard, the Italian Ambassador & Nobil Donna

Antonietta de Martino, Secretary & Mrs. Herbert Clark Hoover, Mrs. Woodrow Wilson, Nicholas Longworth and many another. They all went last week to the inaugural performance of the American Opera Company in Poll's Theatre, Washington.

On the stage that night something happened. Faust was given in English, by an all-American cast, and given so intelligently, with such complete concession to the beauty of the whole, that Washington, dull musically, waxed enthusiastic and fairly hugged itself in the thrill of a new discovery. It was a Faust rejuvenated, lifted well out of the operatic rut, a Faust as true to the spirit of Goethe's poem as to Gounod's music. There was no portly prima donna past her prime to parade as the guileless Marguerita, no heroic stage devil preposterously horned and tailed, no paunchy, heroic Faust singing to the gallery. All that had been discarded. Instead, the curtain went up on one Faust, an aged dissatisfied philosopher with a voice a little pinched, and went down on another, a cavalier Faust, the creation of Mephistopheles' evil genius, a romantic with a voice fittingly curving and lush. Mephistopheles through it all was the Mr. Hyde to Faust's Dr. Jekyll. He was the embodiment of all the negative forces of life, cut by the same pattern as Faust, only his evil self.

The genius back of it all was Vladimir Rosing, who five years ago was no more than a good tenor. He was returning then to Europe after engagements in the U. S. and in the crossing he met George Eastman, rich kodakman of Rochester, N. Y. There were many hours to spare aboard ship. Mr. Eastman's hobby was music and Tenor Rosing had time to talk of his ideal to produce opera for English-speaking audiences in their own language. Mr. Eastman listened well, tucked it all away in the corner of his mind. That summer Tenor Rosing received a cable, and in the fall, after canceling a year's concert engagements, Tenor Rosing returned to the U. S. to be operatic director of the Eastman School of Music. Vladimir Rosing is a Russian, steeped in the artistic notions that have made the Moscow Art Theatre. For him the ensemble is the thing. There can be no such thing as a "star." For him opera at its best must be the synchronization of all the arts--orchestral, vocal, dramatic, scenic, decorative. On such a basis, he trained the Eastman players, brought them last spring to Manhattan as the Rochester American Opera Company, won the acclaim of the critics and, at the end of a week's run, was turning customers away. Shortly after, Rosing and a handful of his artists left the Eastman School, went into business for themselves as the American Opera Company, sponsored by an improvised American Society for Opera in English, Inc. To analyze the elements of so superlative a production is in a way to refute its purpose, its effect. Natalie Hall was the Marguerita. More accurately, the Marguerita was, just incidentally, one Natalie Hall; Mephistopheles was George Fleming Houston; the aged Faust, Patrick Kilkelley; the youthful Faust, Clifford Newdall; Valentin, Raymond Koch. No one of them showed a voice of any great dimensions, but each was vocally adequate and faithful to the tiniest dramatic detail. There were new sets by Robert Edmond Jones, thrilling in color and design, and a new English text by Robert A. Simon, gratefully free from the stilted archaic talk of the old librettos. Greatest tribute to Mr. Rosing was the ensemble, each member of which played like a trained actor as engrossed in being a soldier, or part of a street mob as Natalie Hall was in being Marguerita. Washington clapped the principals, who were really not principals at all but just part of Director Rosing's scheme, clapped the Jones sets, the gabbling street mob that crowded in on the dying Valentin, the conducting of Frank St. Leger* who with a small orchestra wove Gounod's share of it all into a rich, seamless fabric. Critics used big words--big words, capitalized--Art, Beauty, Intelligence. They endorsed just as emphatically the Madame Butterfly and The Marriage of Figaro that rounded out the Washington run, prophesied a big future for the new American Company whose first season will include a seven weeks' run in Manhattan to begin Jan. 10, shorter runs afterward in Boston and Chicago.

* Onetime conductor with the Chicago Civic Opera; with Covent Garden, London.