"God-given Talent"

City editors of newspapers throughout the land stole into the music departments last week, found an unimportant story, stole it, slapped it into their front pages. It was no new theft. They did the same thing when Marion Talley made her debut two seasons ago at the Metropolitan, and presently the telegrapher's daughter from Kansas City was making hundreds of thousands of dollars. They did it for. Mary Lewis, the runaway girl from Little Rock, Ark., who slipped overnight from the ranks of a Ziegfeld chorus to the bosom of grand opera. They repeated it again last week for Grace Moore, onetime musical comedy star, of Hitchy-Koo, Up in the Clouds, of Irving Berlin's Music Box Revue.

The city desk has used the same formula for all three stories: There was the simple little girl who just stepped out on to that great stage and sang her way into the hearts of her audience. There was a special delegation of home folks (in Grace Moore's case it was from Jellico, Tennessee--a father, a mother, a sister, three brothers, U. S. Senators Tyson and McKellar, Representatives Hull and Garrett, and 100 friends). There were also photographs with flowers and Chairman Otto H. Kahn of the Metropolitan Board of Directors.

Songster Grace Moore surpassed her predecessors in the quality of her message to other U. S. singers: "You CAN do it if you have talent, persistence, courage and the inward flame! First, have you God-given talent? If so, carry on beyond all obstacles! You must have the moral courage to face defeat smilingly, to keep your head up, your eyes straight to the front, and to shun the temptation of the primrose path. Carry on till you sing to 'His Glory,' till you can make a weary people forget the troubles of reality. And good luck go with you. Now I shall open my door. I want to go into the arms of my mother, my dad--who always believed in me. Au revoir!"

Musically speaking, she had not "done it." To the musically intelligent, it mattered little that 22 years ago Grace Moore was just a little thing in a muslin dress, lisping "Rock of Ages" in a Tennessee Mountain Church. They confined their attentions to the voice which Grace Moore, 27, used to sing Mimi in the special performance of La Boheme which served for her debut. They stamped it as fresh, smooth and appealing, but small, often insecure, often unfaithful to pitch. Her acting, utterly uninspired, was satisfactory by reason of its simplicity.

Said Critic Richard L. Stokes of the New York Evening World: "Her very comprehensible alarm had not been conquered when the moment befell for her first aria, 'Mi chiamano Mimi,' which contained so many errors of note and time particularly in the tricky opening phrase, that Mr. Bellezza in the orchestra pit must have suffered not a few palpitations of angina pectoris. Like many another tone in this act, the final high C was gratingly off pitch."

Double Bill

Madonna Imperia. Honore de Balzac once spun a droll tale. It had to do with a fifteenth-century courtesan who went in her official capacity to the Ecclesiastical Council of Constance. It had to do with Cardinals and Bishops and a lowly monk named Filippo who dared to want the great lady and for his very audacity was accommodated. But cardinals, bishops, and even the lowly Filippo had been put through a process of purification before they arrived in Manhattan last week for the U. S. premiere of Franco Alfano's* one-act Madonna Imperia. Librettist Arturo Rossato, with a misguided presto, had changed the cardinal to a chancellor, the bishop to a prince, the lowly monk to a lowlier clerk. Composer Alfano had written his music to the Rossato book, afforded it some skillful orchestration and rubbed it smooth of all sparkle. Soprano Maria Muller, pleasing enough as the Madonna, Frederick Jagel, creditable as Filippo, sang conscientiously the notes set down for them.

As an antidote to so tedious a new opera, there followed on the double bill a meritorious favorite:

Le Coq d'Or. Song and action harmonized, but not by the same cast, made this opera great, last week, as it is ever novel. The first cast were mum mimes dancing and acting a superb, glowing fable by Pushkin. The second cast were singers, somberly garbed, and sitting in two great tiers which rose on either side of the dancer-actors.

In the second cast sat Marion Talley, returning to opera for the first time this season. She sang sweetly for the mum mime who acted for her. Enveloping the whole massive, magic scene, staged by Willy Pogany, was the wise, winking music of superb Rimsky-Korsakoff.

*Composer of Resurrection, given by the Chicago Opera with Mary Garden. It was Alfano who took Puccini's themes and finished his posthumous opera Turandot.