Ballpark Opera

Next week Manhattanites may expect to see billboards and subway placards advertising "Opera at the Polo Grounds." Impresario Alfredo Salmaggi will offer Aida in New York's big baseball park on Aug. 2, second annual presentation. Last year's outdoor Aida drew crowds who cannot afford Metropolitan opera seats, can afford Polo Ground opera at $1. Encouraged by success, Maestro Salmaggi has swelled this year's cast to 1,000, has added three camels, three elephants, eight horses to the Egyptian props. Impressive in the big concrete stadium will be vocal choruses, troupes of dancers, parades in full oriental pomp. Russian Diva Anna Lissetshaya will be Aida. National Broadcasting Co.'s Pasquale Rescigno will conduct. Later Samson et Dalila and Cavalleria Rusticana will be given. Then Im- presario Salmaggi will take his principals to Hartford, Providence, Chicago, Montreal ballparks, will present operas with the aid of local choruses, bands, dancers, animals.

Bushy-haired, Rome-born Maestro Sal-maggi has presented grand opera for many a year. Great & good friend of the late Enrico Caruso ("with him I was like a brother"), onetime mandolin teacher to the late Italian Queen Margherita, all his life a musician & music promoter, Maestro Salmaggi nevertheless has no love for an age that has reduced music largely to phonographs, radios. Feeling no musician can avoid the temptation of thus being reproduced he cries with Latin vehemence: "I would rather have a boy of mine [he is nine times a father] be a barber than a musician. Anybody--anybody--can go Bah! Bah! into a microphone--so! Artists today. . . ." Though Son Felix, 18, and Daughter Lena, 19, possess good singing voices, he will not let them think of musical careers, will not allow a piano in his home.

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