Rumor Confirmed

Last week Composer Deems Taylor confirmed the rumor (TIME, Feb. 25) that his new, Metropolitan-commissioned opera would be based on Street Scene, a play by Elmer Rice, now successful on Broadway. Street Scene is about tenement life.

Goossens-Bennett

From London last week came word of another new opera in English, the libretto for which has been written by Novelist Enoch Arnold Bennett, the music by Eugene Goossens. Their opera is called Judith and based on the apocryphal legend which has served many a poet and composer before them.* It will be performed at Covent Garden early this summer.

Glee

With lusty lungs that swelled together proudly under stiff white shirts, with good enunciation, faithful pitch and clean phrasing, Dartmouth won last week in Manhattan the 13th Inter-Collegiate Glee Club Contest. Twelve clubs competed-- Dartmouth, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Fordham, New York University, Ohio State, Duke, the University of Oklahoma, Lafayette College, Pennsylvania State College and Wesleyan University. The last six were winners in regional competition. After Dartmouth, New York University sang best, then Ohio State. Victorious a third year in succession, the Dartmouth gleemen took back to Hanover a silver cup given-for-keeps by Manhattan's University Glee Club.

"Little Angel Papa"

A crowd of mumbling peasants fills a convent courtyard and hails, when whipped by his henchman, the man they do not want for Tsar. The scene changes and in his cell, by the feeble light of a lamp, a monk sits writing the history of Muscovy, how a Tsar's son has been killed and his murderer has taken the throne. Again a change; the Kremlin bells are ringing and across the square that separates the Cathedrals of the Assumption and the Archangels there files a procession --deacons, sons of boyars, boyars and the new Tsar himself. Gloria! Gloria! it is Boris Godounov. ... So goes the Boris of Composer Modeste Petrovich Moussorgsky, the Boris of Basso Feodor Ivanovitch Chaliapin, given last week for the first time this year at the Metropolitan Opera.

The Metropolitan's Boris, critics have complained, is Chaliapin with accompaniments. Moussorgsky's stark music is played in the prettied version of Rimsky-Korsakov. The chorus, the cast all save Chaliapin, sing in Italian. He, proudly a Russian, sings the language in which Boris was written, the language of the down trodden peasants. Being Chaliapin, the greatest of living singing-actors, he dominated last week as always.

The crowds cheered Chaliapin again last week, as Mephistopheles in Gounod's Faust, a benefit performance which made $7,500 for his Sir Wilfred Grenfell's medi cal mission in Labrador. Lest his audiences should fail to count themselves as blessed, the Great One let it be known that next year he would stay in Europe, traveling, taking his little pleasures.* In the U. S. there are concert tours, a few operatic appearances, fabulous offers from cinema concerns. But in Europe, with friends and family who call him "the little angel papa," he will rest, wear his rough clothes, thunder for vodka.

Towering over an interviewer, he delivered a "far-well" speech last week. Excerpts :

"... I have been the idolized and the hated, the loved and the misunderstood.

"I can tell it now. Now that I am through.

"Misunderstood! By critics especially and by my colleagues and rivals. They do not know that my art is different from that of any other singer. For them singing is a matter of doing beautifully the lines of the melody.

They are concerned with the proper 'vocal production.' tone "They into are the 'mask,' concerned using with the getting the breathing apparatus properly, knowing how to sup port the tone with the abdomen. Yes, that is right. But beautiful tone is not my art. It is only the background."

Cinema Singers

It is not unprecedented for a cinemactor to aspire to opera. Hope Hampton with the Philadelphia Grand Opera Company (TIME, Dec. 31). Richard Dix also takes his singing seriously. And last week it was pressagented that Charles Ray, 38, is cultivating his high tenor voice for a career. According to one Alfredo Martino, a Manhattan teacher. Cinemactor Ray takes two lessons a day when in town. At present he is touring with a vaudeville act in which he sings and plays the piano. It is a comedy act but now the famed Ray grin is just a mask for a great and earnest purpose. He practices for opera in his dressing room with a portable, collapsible piano.

Piccoloist

Ever since the story ending "Who called that son-of-a-gun a piccolo-player?" won its wide circulation, piccoloists have had considerable difficulty in getting themselves taken seriously. Last week Maurice Van Praag, personnel manager of the New York Philharmonic-Symphony, told another piccolo story:

A Philharmonic piccoloist wandered recently into the wareroom of a phonograph company where a salesman bent all efforts to sell him a machine. Bravely the piccoloist withstood his attack but yielded finally when it was suggested that he go into the laboratory and make some records himself. A fortnight later he went back and the disks were played for him.

"Now!" said the salesman rubbing his hands, "NOW! don't you want to buy a phonograph?"

"No!" said the artist. "I want to throw away my piccolo."

*Other Judiths have been written by Karl Gotze (first performance in Magdeburg, 1887), George Whitefield Chadwick (Worcester, Mass., 1901), Max Ettinger (Nuremberg, 1922), Arthur Honegger (Mezieres, Switzerland, 1925). Honegger's Judith is in the repertoire of the Chicago Civic Opera Company, Mary Garden the Judith. The same legend supplied Emil Nikolaus Reznicek with his Holofernes, first given in Berlin in 1923.

*But not in Russia where his return is forbidden by the Soviet Government.