More Moore

Beethoven's Fidelia with sure-voiced Kirsten Flagstad jam-packed the Metropolitan Opera House last week. But the record crowd of the season turned out for a special performance of La Boheme in which the heroine was Grace Moore making her first Manhattan opera appearance since 1932. Since then, with One Night of Love and Love Me Forever, the blonde soprano had become a top-notch cinema success. She had sung in London's Covent Garden at the command of the Royal Family (TIME, June 24), returned to the U. S. to be greeted like a Jenny Lind. Airplanes circled her ship, flying streamers inscribed with "WELCOME, GRACE MOORE!"

For two days before last week's performance the prima donna from Jellico, Tenn. kept to her suite in the Hotel Sherry-Netherland, refusing to speak lest she tire her voice. On the stage she exhibited more grace and confidence than she did at her debut in 1928. Otherwise her progress was unnoticeable. Her voice, at best, is naturally ingratiating. But it is still technically insecure, often feeble and rasping when she strives for top notes, empty and meaningless when she tries to sing low.

The final curtain sent autograph-hunters scurrying around to the narrow stage entrance where one of the few to be admitted was Louise Jones, a gaunt, middle-aged blind woman from Kansas City who plays the violin, runs a beauty shop and keeps scrapbooks of Grace Moore press clippings. Miss Jones had never heard her idol in opera before. But she had sat through 40 showings of One Night of Love, a record bettered, according to Grace Moore, only by a Welshwoman whom she met in London last summer. The Welshwoman, aged 76, had seen the cinema 76 times.

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