Old Girl

Her name rarely appears on Metropolitan Opera programs. But she has sung in Manhattan's old opera house for 27 seasons. In Der Rosenkavalier she is a Viennese lady, handsome in bouffant black. In Lohengrin she is a bewigged wedding guest. In Mignon she gets a laugh, mincing along with a bird cage. In Carmen she wanders backstage selling papier-mache pumpkins. In L'Anima Allegro, she was a pipe-smoking gypsy crone (see cut). In Tannhauser few years ago she substituted for Maria Jeritza as the corpse of Elizabeth, because that strapping diva dreaded being carried down a stage mountain on a small bier. And in dozens of other operas "Maman" Maria Savage is a familiar figure to music-loving New Yorkers. She is one of the 105 hard-drilled men & women who swarm the stage singing choruses, gesticulating vivaciously, OH-ing and AH-ing in mechanical unison. Now a tall, spare woman of 70, Maria Savage calls herself "the world's oldest chorus girl."

In 1887 she was Maria Metten, daughter of the Chief of Police of Namur, Belgium. A mezzo-soprano, she sang in church choirs and local concerts, yearned to be an opera singer. But Bourgeois Papa Metten would have no truck with such notions. When Daughter Maria got a bit in La Favorita with a local opera company, went home with an armful of flowers after what she considered a triumphal debut, she found the Metten doors sternly locked. Thereupon Maria Metten borrowed money from friends, went to Brussels, then to Paris, finally made a clean break with her family by getting a job at London's Covent Garden. Presently she married a Briton named Morris Savage, sub-manager of the Imperial Bank, who was later ordered out to his firm's office in Persia. In her three years in Teheran Mrs. Savage lived in a palace, sang at social functions. The Shah, she says, told her: "Madame, you sing like a bulbul." Under the impression that the Shah was referring to the Persian nightingale, Mme Savage naturally felt flattered. Later she heard a braying donkey called a "bulbul," learned that Persians also applied the term to any noisy animal. Says she today: "I still don't know what the Shah meant."

Back in London Mr. Savage, bereft of job and money, disappeared forever. Never much of a factor in his wife's accounts of their life, this good Britisher lost what remained of his identity when the former Maria Metten took to pronouncing their name as if it were French. In 1908 Chorus Master Giulio Setti offered her a place at the newly reorganized Metropolitan. She sailed on the same ship with Giulio Gatti-Casazza, says she flirted with him all the way across under the impression he was a fellow artist, "so you can imagine how I felt when I knew he would be my impresario." Nothing daunted, Mme Savage readily embraced life in the chorus, which she says is happy because "you mix with the greatest artists in the world." By those artists Mme Savage came to be loved and respected, to be called "Maman" and "Mother." Farrar gave her a wig, Nellie Melba jewels, Sibyl Sanderson a fan--all of which used to figure in Maman Savage's garb when she appeared as an aristocratic Parisian in Andrea Chenier. Caruso gave her an opal ring, a gold medal of himself which he had struck off for friends.

Supplementing her $60 a week, Maman Savage took pupils in voice, French diction, dramatics. Today she lives with her beauteous, red-haired daughter May, also a Metropolitan chorus girl, in a Riverside Drive penthouse full of souvenirs, curios and whatnots. On its terrace she raises lettuce, tomatoes, weeds which she does not like to destroy because she thinks them pretty. In Maman Savage's parlor is a nickel-&-dime bank for contributions to the Ellin Prince Speyer hospital for ani-mals--in memory of her cat, buried in Hartsdale Cemetery beneath a tombstone marked "Our Minikin." Stately and white- haired, Maman Savage wears sombre silks, heavy ornaments, a gold-rimmed pince-nez. But she is as keen-eyed and lively as any youngster, joining gaily in such Metropolitan pranks as tickling fat Tenor Lauritz Melchior in Parsifal. "He is so ticklish! So he always says, 'Please, ladies. Do not! I am so ticklish!' It's great fun at the rehearsals!"

Having survived Gatti's long regime at the Metropolitan, Maman Savage began to wonder what would become of her under brisk new Director Edward Johnson. In line with a policy of bringing pretty faces and slim figures into the old opera house, Director Johnson lately started weeding oldsters out of the chorus, putting some of them on pensions. Last week, however, "the world's oldest chorus girl" had official assurances that she was too much of a fixture at the Metropolitan to be dropped now, would be kept on at least for another season regardless of her age.

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