In Chicago

A large snapping turtle named Orpheus made itself at home last week in Chicago's expensive Blackstone Hotel. It was the honored guest of Mrs. Ben Rubenstein, wife of a British timber merchant. As Conchita Supervia, Mrs. Rubenstein was in Chicago to sing Carmen with the Civic Opera Company. The turtle was her talisman.* Never before had she found one sturdy enough to weather touring. She had always depended on a little silver turtle, the insignia of the Orden de la Tortuga of which ex-King Alfonso of Spain and the late Dictator Primo de Rivera were charter members. The grandfather turtle (age 14) had been given her when she landed in Manhattan by Grandmother Ernestine Schumann-Heink, Baritone John Charles Thomas, Tenor Beniamino Gigli. So long as it lived she would feel sure of success. Conchita Supervia succeeded in selling out the house with her Carmen, in convincing the audience that she was really Spanish, alluring and sure of her power over men, in recalling the Carmen of Spanish Maria Gay who used to tear an orange apart with her teeth and spit out the peels.

Conchita Supervia sang nicely last week, played castanets better than any of the current Carmens. But not even the big turtle could make her voice big enough to fill the Chicago Opera House or make her pretty gypsy-girl appear deeply, inevitably tragic.

The Chicago Opera packs up its scenery this week, prepares for its annual two weeks in Boston, the only city it will visit this year. To all appearances Chicago's home season has been more profitable this season than last. Attendance has been better. Artistically, the season has been an undisputed success.

Moon's Mountain

Huge (208 lb.) Kate Smith last week had her RKO vaudeville salary increased from $4,750 to $6,000 a week, because receipts at Manhattan's Franklin Theatre, where she was singing, had jumped from $8,000 to $16,500. While Singer Smith is at Keith's Theatre in Washington next week, RKO will pay line charges for her radio program, for La Palina Cigars, to the Columbia Broadcasting System, rival to RKO's National Broadcasting Co.

When Singer Kathryn Elizabeth Smith first sang at Keith's Theatre (then Crandall's) in Washington, she got nothing for her performance. That was in 1926, when, while she was studying to be a hospital nurse, she made her stage debut in a benefit production. Pleased by her quivering technique, Funnyman Eddie Dowling presently gave her a job in Honeymoon Lane. Singer Smith had barely had time to continue her musicomedy career in Hit the Deck, Flying High, when Fleischmann's Yeast put her on the radio which concealed the comical incongruity between her strong, low sentimental voice and her jellyfish physique.

Concerned with the moon, like that of almost all her rival crooners, her theme song is called "When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain." She is proud because she helped write the lyric. Kate Smith is so popular that last autumn she received a letter from the president of the Uniformed Firemen's Association of Greater New York saying that she had been chosen "Sweetheart of the Fire Department of the City of New York." She gave an even more convincing demonstration of her appeal when, with Funnyman Lou Holtz, she was a principal on the bill which smashed all records by lasting eleven weeks at Manhattan's Palace Theatre, No. 1 vaudeville house in the U. S. Singer Smith is 23 years old, addicted to plain clothes, backgammon, soda fountain drinks, prizefights. Like Caruso, she has small vocal cords, immensely powerful lungs, a jolly disposition.

Affairs at the Met

The Metropolitan Opera is an old fogy with antiquated ways. It lives in a shabby, inconvenient old house. Its staging has shown no progress. The same scenery is used again and again. . . . Ottavia Scotto. South American impresario, said all this in effect when he arrived in Manhattan last week on the S. S. France. New York needs a larger opera house, he said, a modern one, with cheaper seats.

Criticisms and prescriptions on the order of Impresario Scotto's have simmered and boiled in Manhattan all season. Many have thought that Radio City offered the logical cure. A new Metropolitan would be built there in another two years, they prophesied. But the Metropolitan appears to be of a different mind. The property belongs to 35 conservative parterre-box-holders who are unwilling to sell out at Depression prices and unwilling, many of them, to let Metropolitan traditions be swallowed up in John Davison Rockefeller Jr.'s new commercialized enterprise. Radio City officials, tired of the Met's indecision, let it be known lately that opera of some description would be given there whether the Met came in or not. Leopold Stokowski announced that the Philadelphia Grand Opera would come over and give guest performances (TIME, Jan. 11). Chicago's Herbert Witherspoon conferred secretly with Samuel Lionel ("Roxy") Rothafel. Then there was a hint that the Chicago Civic Opera Company might also come on for occasional visits.*

Meanwhile the rumor persisted that the Metropolitan was so hard hit financially that it might have to curtail its present season or disband in the spring. Banker Otto Hermann Kahn, some said, resigned as board chairman this autumn because he was tired of playing patron. But people who believed that knew little of the Metropolitan's workings. Banker Kahn owns from 70 to 80% of the producing company's stock but, contrary to the impression he sometimes gives, he has never "backed" it in the sense that Mr. & Mrs. Harold Fowler McCormick once backed Chicago's Opera or that Louis Eckstein now personally backs Ravinia. For more than 20 years Impresario Giulio Gatti-Casazza has run New York's opera and managed to enhance its prestige without incurring a deficit. He presents each season several new operas and the world's highest priced singers. He even built up a reserve fund which carried him through last year when seat sales started to fall off.

A new Swedish soprano made many forget all these mumblings & grumblings last week. She was Goeta Ljungberg (pronounced Zhoeta Yungberg), tall, blonde, beautiful. For her debut she sang Sieglinde in Die Walkuere as if she really believed that sisters sometimes met their brothers far from nowhere, loved them instantly and consumingly.

Soprano Ljungberg's voice has lovely subtle tones but is not strikingly powerful for a Wagnerian's. It was only a medium-sized voice when on her eighth birthday she sang for the Queen of Sweden, got five crowns because she had "gold in her throat." She spent the five crowns on cakes and milk for her school friends. In Stockholm's singing academy she learned German (she calls it Yarman) and the German operas. She acquired superstitions. The right foot must come out of bed first in the morning, the right stocking go on first. If a costume is so designed that the left arm must go in first, even today the great Ljungberg spits three times. She spits three times, too, if she walks out of the house in the morning and sees an ugly old woman before she sees a handsome young man.

In Manhattan she will sing Tosca, hitherto regarded as the sacred property of Soprano Maria Jeritza, also tall, blonde, athletic, but no spitter.

*Supervia's Orpheus is probably the bulkiest, most troublesome talisman on record. But nearly all musicians are superstitious, carry some sort of charm. Arturo Toscanini keeps sewed in his dress clothes' pocket a picture of his three children taken when they were little and a visiting card on which Composer Giueseppe Verdi sent him New Year's greetings shortly before he died. Caruso used to have every costume made with two little pockets on either side. In them he kept vials of salt water and if he felt thirsty he turned his back on the audience, took a drink. Soprano Rosa Ponselle never sings without the little silver cross she wore when she made her Metropolitan Opera debut. Pianist Ernest Schelling keeps in his waistcoat pocket a four-leaf clover pressed between glass. Pianist Vladimir Horowitz always has a picture of Liszt in the artists' room, Violinist Yehndi Menuhin a bronze head of Toscanini. Pianist Jose Iturbl goes to every concert with an apple and a clean collar. During intermission he eats the apple and changes his collar. Baritone Lawrence Tibbett wears a comical silver rabbit when he sings, Tenor Gigli a little gold bell his daughter once pinned on his pajamas. Violinist Jascha Heifetz hates to admit that he is superstitious about his ring with the Ceylon ruby but Soprano Lucrezia Bori is not one bit ashamed of the little gold key she wears pinned to her garter. She calls it her "key to happiness."

*Last week President Samuel Insull warned the Civic's guarantors, whose five-year pledge ends with this season, that unless they renew pledges for $500,000 there may be no opera next year.

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