Tourists

Fortnight ago a chesty little Italian stood on the platform in Manhattan's Grand Central Station, proudly watching a train pull out for Montreal. Aboard it was his San Carlo Opera Company, starting on its 26th consecutive season, solidly booked for 35 weeks. Chesty little Fortune Gallo has long challenged anyone who says that opera cannot pay. San Carlo's record last week again proved him right. The Company played in Montreal, Ottawa, Hamilton, Toronto.* During the week 25,000 persons crowded to hear Fortune Gallo's troupers.

The operas all came from a long-established repertoire dominated by Verdi, Puccini, Wagner. The staging was trite. The singing was sure but rarely exciting. Yet, for all that, the customers got more than their money's worth. Seats for San Carlo opera sell at $1.50 top. The people who patronize it are neither snobs nor sophisticates. In Manhattan and in Chicago the big opera companies have had to beg for their lives. The San Carlo Company, supported only by its box-office takings, toured 20,000 miles last season, made money.

Less successful impresarios often refer to "Gallo luck." (His name means "Lucky Rooster.") But Gallo believes more in hard work and frugality. He pays his routine singers $85 per week, thus can afford to keep his seat prices low. Even at such wages the singers sing often. And if they complain of their schedules, Gallo can always remind them of the hours he has worked since he arrived in the U. S.. an immigrant of 17 who had lost all but 12-c- shooting craps in the steerage.

Young Fortune Gallo clerked in an Italian bank in Manhattan, collected bills for a gas company, managed a small brass band, then bigger bands which he took touring throughout the U. S. In 1910 he organized his opera troupe. The second season's deficit ($700) he swears was his last. But Gallo worked hard to convince small-towners that opera is not a rich man's bore. One of his converts was the late Warren Gamaliel Harding, then a country newspaper editor, who reluctantly accepted free tickets, heard his first performance when the San Carlo visited Marion, Ohio.

In boom times Fortune Gallo had three companies on the road. He gave debuts to Queena Mario and Richard Bonelli. And this winter Soprano Charlotte Symons, another San Carlo product, will make her Metropolitan debut. Gallo's pride is that in 25 years his troupers have missed only one performance, when a train was derailed in Texas. Gallo's wire from Manhattan: "Is scenery hurt?"

Nowadays the San Carlo master rarely travels with the performers, prefers to drop in on them when least expected. On one such occasion he arrived in New Orleans during a matinee, met the company harpist ambling along the streets. The player tried to explain that the opera was Rigoletto, that the score calls for no harp. But Gallo was not to be placated. He saw to it that for the Rigolettos thereafter the harpist went into the pit, played.

*From Toronto the San Carlo Company goes to Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, plays a month in Kansas City, brief stands in the South, then goes up the Pacific Coast to Vancouver, ends its tour in St. Louis in May.

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