O'Neill into Opera

(See front cover)

Twenty times last week a strapping, coffee-colored man in a baby-blue wrapper went out in front of the curtain of Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House to bow right & left in a shattering storm of applause. Ten times there appeared with him a stocky, wavy-haired man in busi- ness clothes who stood and looked bewildered. The coffee-colored man was Baritone Lawrence Tibbett, the bewildered one Composer Louis Gruenberg. Because Gruenberg had been fascinated by a short, stark play of Eugene O'Neill's called Emperor Jones, because he had hunted O'Neill out one midnight in Paris two years ago, got permission to set the play to music and then proceeded potently to do so, New York had witnessed the premiere of the most exciting U. S. opera yet written. For Baritone Tibbett the moment was a career's fine crown.

Unlike sexy Strange Interlude and Mourning Becomes Electra, Emperor Jones contains no love motif. O'Neill's hero was a Negro convict, a one-time Pullman porter, crapshooter, murderer, who escaped to the West Indies, called himself Emperor, bled his native subjects until they turned on him, chased him into the jungle and destroyed him. Two grotesque African gods pillared the stage when the Metropolitan curtain went up last week and an off-stage chorus started shouting "He mus' die." Brasses blared savagely against a rattle of percussives. The first short scene made Metropolitan listeners fear that another opera was about to be given in English which they could not understand. Soprano Pearl Besuner, made up as a haggish black woman, was almost unintelligible as she informed Smithers, Jones's cockney factotum, that the natives had rebelled, gathered on a distant hill to hatch Jones's death. Tenor Marek Windheim's cockney accent only added to the confusion. But then Baritone Lawrence Tibbett swaggered on the stage.

Realistically brown, wearing a baby-blue coat, red pants, patent leather boots and spurs, Tibbett sat himself insolently on a red plush throne, put his feet up on the arm, began magnificently to impersonate Emperor Jones. In soft, natural Negro dialect, perfectly suited to the smooth, dark color of his voice, he boasted about how he had fooled the natives, telling them that only a silver bullet could kill him. He boasted about his record back in the States where he had killed two men. broken jail. Then Smithers told him about the savages on the hill. They were molding with voodoo rites a special silver bullet. The far-away sound of tom-toms told Jones his game was up. With a panama hat on the back of his head, Emperor Jones Tibbett, whistling "Swanee River." abandoned his palace, started into the dark Caribbean jungle designed by Jo Mielziner.

Off-stage the drums beat louder. Strings and woodwinds whispered spookily. Jones, tired by running, sank to the ground. His feet hurt him. He pulled off his boots and fanned his toes. His stomach was empty. He hunted vainly for food which he had hidden under a white stone against just such a time? Dwarfish forms like tree-stumps started moving towards him, ha'nts which frightened him so that he drew his pearl-handled revolver, fired at them.

Stumbling blindly through the jungle, the tired, terrorized savage who had been an Emperor fired his second shot at the ghost of a Negro porter he had killed with a razor in a crap game, his third shot at the apparition of a prison-guard he once bashed with a shovel, his fourth at an old-time auctioneer who he fancied was trying to sell him for a slave, his fifth at a hallucinary figure trying to buy him. All his fine clothes gone except his shredded trousers, he flung himself on his knees and sang "It's ame, it's ame, Oh, Lawd, standin' in de need of prayer." This inserted spiritual, the only conventionally melodic bit that Composer Gruenberg used, Tibbett sang with sweat gleaming all over his brown body. Down people's spines it sent shivers that they did not get later on, even when the drums reached their greatest crescendo and the chorus, shouting and wailing in conflicting keys and rhythms, closed in on him. In O'Neill's play the natives kill Jones but in the opera Tibbett beat the ground, pawed the air, killed himself with his own silver bullet.

Long before Tibbett moaned his last "Jesus," people who had come to the performance apprehensively had forgotten their misgivings. Music retards most drama. When an operatic Emperor Jones was announced many people wondered whether Gruenberg would emasculate the play with the romantic touch which characterized his early, prize-winning Hill of Dreams, his setting of John Erskine's Jack and the Beanstalk (TIME, Nov. 30-1931), or whether he would submerge it with syncopated dissonances. But doubters were as unacquainted with Gruenberg's theatrical sense as they were with the man himself--son of a violinist who used to play in a Yiddish theatre on Manhattan's East Side; poor because, unlike Deems Taylor and many a present-day composer, he will not do catchpenny work.

Gruenberg wrote the music for Emperor Jones two summers ago in a cheap seaside cottage at Old Orchard, Maine, where he went around naked until a Salvation Army troupe moved in next door and set him tearing his hair with their cornet practice. He wrote a score to emphasize the savage pace of the O'Neill play. He arranged for his characters to speak many of their lines to tense orchestral accompaniment, quiet except for the recurring drums. The words they sang would follow only a vague melodic line.

Gruenberg planned to have tom-toms in the orchestra pit, in the wings, even in the auditorium to give the audience the full effect of the pursuers closing in on Jones. He planned to have the Negro chorus hidden at first in the orchestra. Then gradually it would emerge with cries of hate. The Metropolitan's production fell short of Gruenberg's plans, partly because of the stage limitations. Conductor Tullio Serafin conducted the orchestra brilliantly but there was no room in his pit for the chorus. The painted witch-doctor (Negro Hemsley Winfield) had to crawl awkwardly out of the prompter's box to dance the final incantation. Drums were given no place in the auditorium. Jo Mielziner's Caribbean jungle was dark but not scary.

With his superb singing and acting Tibbett made up what the production lacked. "Well, I guess I a'most holds my lead," Emperor Jones panted in the middle of his flight from the ha'nts. If Baritone Tibbett is ever pursued by ha'nts--shades of great bygone baritones--he and the public knew after last week's performance that he had more than held his lead among his contemporaries in his progress towards the high place once held by Giuseppe Campanari, Maurice Renaud, Pasquale Amato, Antonio Scotti. Campanari is dead. Renaud and Amato are no longer singing. Scotti will give his farewell performance next week.

There remains no baritone of potentially historic acclaim save Tibbett who, essentially practical and intelligent about his career, wastes no time worrying about his temperament but proceeds methodically, laboriously to equip himself for great things. He knows that sooner or later he will inherit some of Scotti's roles. He has already sung Scarpia in road performances of Tosca. He would like to sing Falstaff. the role Scotti was singing that night eight years ago when the audience suddenly started shouting "Tibbett! Tibbett!" stopping the show for 20 minutes because it liked the young American who sang the part of Ford. He would like to sing Boris Godounov, particularly since his acting in Simone Boccanegra reminded people, not unfavorably, of great Basso Chaliapin's.

In Simone Boccanegra last autumn Tibbett opened the Manhattan opera season (TIME, Nov. 28). an honor the Metropolitan has given to only one other male singer, the late great Tenor Caruso. Tenors are naturally the heroes of most operas just as pitchers are the heroes of ball games. Baritones, like catchers, have to knock homeruns to be noticed and their chances at conspicuous parts come less often than a catcher's turn at bat. Tibbett's homerun in Falstaff earned him a $1,500 bonus from the Metropolitan management and opportunities which, stretching out into four distinct musical fields, combined to make him the most popularly known singer in the U. S. He was given increasingly important roles at the Metropolitan: Amonasro in Aida, Telramund in Lohengrin, Wolfram in Tannhauser, King Eadgar in The King's Henchman, Colonel Ibbetson in Peter Ibbetson, Jonny in Jonny Spielt Auf, the elder Germont in La Traviata, Sheriff Jack Ranee in The Girl of the Golden West.

Tibbett's youthful, unaffected manner helped almost as much as his strong, velvety voice to make him a success in concerts. Scotti, like many another opera singer, has to have costumes, footlights, makeup, to excite an audience. In concert last year Tibbett's only money-getting rival was Pianist Ignace Jan Paderewski. Tibbett averaged $3,500 apiece from 55 concerts. In Winnipeg (217,000 pop.) he drew three capacity audiences to the Auditorium within a year, with box-office receipts amounting to over $8,000 each time. This year his concert engagements have swelled to 65, due to his departure into two fields unheard of by oldtime singers: Last winter he gave 13 Monday night broadcasts at $4,000 apiece for Firestone Tire & Rubber Co.,- sang many popular songs. This winter he is doing the same. Two years before signing his radio contract, the longest and most expensive that any opera singer has had, he caused some of his admirers to shake disapproving heads by becoming an out & out romantic cinema hero.

When Tibbett went West to make his first picture, The Rogue Song, feature-writers in the little world of Hollywood rushed hotfoot to ask the big New York opera singer where he had come from originally, where he had started singing. Tibbett startled them somewhat by his reply, "Right here." He was born in Bakersfield, Calif, when it was a rip-roaring oil-boom town. His father was sheriff of Kern County. His Uncle Ed kept the leading Bakersfield saloon.

Sheriff Tibbett was killed by bandits. The family moved to Los Angeles and when Son Lawrence was a scrawny grammar-school boy, all ears and legs, he was helping support the family, delivering newspapers, singing "Goodbye, My Bluebell" at the top of his lungs while he pedaled from house to house. His lungs were not so strong as they sounded. Doctors sent him to live on another uncle's ranch where he learned to be. a cowboy. Back in Los Angeles at the Manual Arts High School (where he was classmate of Aviator Jimmy Doolittle), Tibbett started studying to be a singer. War came. He joined the Navy, four days after his discharge married Grace Mackay Smith with whom he went to school.

A year later the Tibbetts had twins but no steady means of support. Tibbett clerked in a newspaper advertising department, folded Sunday papers, ushered in cinemansions, sang in churches, at funerals, acted occasionally in the Hollywood Community Theatre, toured briefly and disastrously in Tyrone Powers' Shakespearean company. Tibbett was 25 and the twins 2 when in 1922 James G. Wrarren, Los Angeles merchant, loaned him $2,000 to go to New York, insured his life as collateral. Mrs. Tibbett worked in a Los Angeles real estate office while Tibbett studied with Frank La Forge, sang Sundays at the North Avenue Presbyterian Church in New Rochelle.

Tibbett's Metropolitan Opera audition got him a $60-a-week contract. He made his debut as Valentine in Faust, learned the role in two days without knowing a word of French. Just another baritone, critics thought, with a better voice than most but no experience. He muddled his entrances and exits. His elbows stuck out. His small, turned-up nose was not much to look at. He got the chance to sing Ford in Falstaff only because Baritone Vincente Ballester was sick. When the audience started shouting for him Tibbett was upstairs in his dressing-room removing his makeup, unaware of the demonstration sweeping the house.

Since then Tibbett has behaved as modestly as any good Alger hero. He has a new wife, the former Mrs. Jennie Marston Burgard,-a home in Hollywood's fashionable Beverly Hills, a Lincoln car which he drives like mad. But Tibbett has cultivated no lofty conceits, no temperamental whimsies. He refused the private dining room which Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer gave him in Hollywood. He still thinks, and says, that singing is "just about the best fun that the human animal can have." He will still burst into song on the street or in restaurants, and he is not too proud to sing "Casey Jones" or "Frankie and Johnny."

Viennese Schlagobers

In Vienna it is the custom for children confirmed at St. Stephen's Cathedral to be taken afterwards for a drive through the Prater, then to a pastry-shop where they are allowed to eat their fill of schlagobers (whipped cream). Decade ago schlagobers inspired homey Frau Richard Strauss to write a ballet scenario. Herr Richard lathered it with music prodigiously orchestrated, conducted it at the Vienna Staatsoper to celebrate his 60th birthday. In the ballet, pralines, marzipans and gingerbread men dance in a pastry-shop kitchen. Whipped-cream ballerinas waltz out of a giant bowl. An over-stuffed little boy has a nightmare which serves to bring chocolate creams and knall-bonbons on the stage, more pralines, more schlagobers.

Last week Strauss's Schlagobers had its U. S. premiere in a concert suite conducted by Bruno Walter with the New York Philharmonic-Symphony. Most critics pounced on it as asinine stuff well-named. They remarked, not for the first time, that the genius who wrote Elektra and Rosenkavalier, Till Eulenspiegel and Don Juan, had petered out. Strauss's amazing orchestrations are taken so much for granted that no one thought to comment on the fact that the worst of Strauss is better than the best of most present-day composers.

*Companions of Mrs. Tibbett at last week's premiere were Mr. & Mrs. Harvey S. Firestone Jr. *Daughter of retired banker Edgar L. Marston of Manhattan. She was married twice before, to Robert J. Adams, son of the chewing-gum tycoon, and to John Clark Burgard of San Francisco.

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