Ghosts in a Garden

Opera in London is a ghost that will not be laid. Companies organize, fail, only to have other companies arise behind them. Alone to preserve prestige has been the theatre in which most of the world's historic singers have been heard: famed Covent Garden, in the midst of the principal flower, fruit and vegetable market of the city.

After last spring's opera season (TIME, May 12) it looked as if Covent Garden might again be forced to go dark operatically. But last week British Broadcast Co. came to the rescue (as it did some years ago for British orchestral music), announced that it would subsidize Covent Garden Opera to the extent of $150,000 a year. The new Company, headed by F. A. Szarvasy of Dunlop Rubber Co. Ltd. will present 200 performances a year. Only for ten weeks in the spring will world-famed artists be engaged. Six-week seasons in autumn and winter and fortnightly seasons in six outlying cities will be given by British artists at popular prices. The scheme is not unlike that propounded by Sir Thomas Beecham who has already spent $10,000,000 of his pill fortune on opera in England.

Coincidentally last week there rose at Covent Garden a ghost of another description. Seats had been taken out of the auditorium. Jazzman Herman Darewski (composer of "Whispering," "K-K-Katy") was playing for a ball, when suddenly he noticed his drummer drop his sticks, stare goggle-eyed into space. Darewski turned and saw (he said) an apparition of Wagner's Siegfried, helmeted and armed, stalking over the heads of the dancers. Darewski collapsed in a chair. Dancers flocked around him, said they could see nothing. But the incident gave rise to much whispering. It has long been rumored that Covent Garden is haunted (so, it is said, are the Drury Lane and Haymarket Theatres). The arrogant Siegfried might well have objected to the use of his hunting-ground for dances, cinema and other money-raising devices to which the old theatre has of late years been reduced.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.