Mastersingers for Meistersinger

Last week, with an anglicized version of Wagner's Die Meistersinger, the Cincinnati Symphony ended its first season's attempt at presenting grand opera as a part of its regular schedule. Four Wagner operas had been given in all. Singers had been imported for principal roles. A group of local choristers had gladly sung for nothing. In Die Meistersinger last week the Eva was one of the comeliest young women who has ever made an operatic debut. She was Inez Gorman, 23.

Soprano Gorman piped prettily as the ingenuous young heroine. But in spite of Eugene Goossens' deft conducting, there was many a time when it was impossible to hear her over the big Wagner orchestra. Generous Cincinnati critics credited her with having made a promising start in opera. Newshawks made much of the facts that she had once won a bathing beauty contest (in 1929), when she was a high-school student in Bessemer, Mich., that she had twice been invited to join the Follies. Such publicity found little favor with the Gorman family which comes from proud old Gloucester fishing stock. Inez Gorman's grandfather was the late Captain John Evans Gorman. Inez Gorman's father left the sea for music, studied at the New England Conservatory, went on to make a serious career of teaching, now supervises public school music in Adams, Mass. When she was able to get a scholarship at Philadelphia's Curtis Institute of Music, Inez Gorman went there as a matter of course. When she went to St. Louis to sing minor roles with the Municipal Opera, she met James Stagliano, first horn player in the St. Louis Symphony. Year ago she became his wife.

Cincinnati Germans who do much to support Cincinnati Music complained chiefly because Die Meistersinger had become The Master singers, had suffered, according to their lights, by the English translation. Similar controversies have simmered in every U. S. opera community. For those who believe that the texts should be comprehensible to all, there are as many who want their operas the way they were written. The advocates of anglicized opera maintain that theirs is the one solution for broadening opera's appeal in the U. S., point to the fact that in European opera houses performances are almost always given in the language of the country.

The other side holds that listeners get more from the music if they are not straining to catch every word that is sung. Most translations are inept, a handicap to real enjoyment. In the first act of Madame Butterfly it is obvious to any onlooker that Pinkerton is making love to Cho-Cho-San. Curving melody flows from the orchestra while he sings, "Just like a little squirrel are all her pretty movements." To many Tristan would seem foolish delivering a literal translation of his part in the exalted love duet. The music would be reaching its grandest climax while he would be singing, "Thou Isolde, Tristan I. No more Tristan, no more Isolde. . . ."

Operatic comedies have had the most success in translation. The Cleveland Orchestra has given praiseworthy performances of Die Fledermaus and The Secret of Suzanne in English. Philadelphia excelled with Falstaff and The Marriage of Figaro last winter. All children want to understand the words when they go to Hansel and Gretel, a fact recognized years ago by the touring San Carlo Company.

To tamper with the grander works is something else, according to Herbert F. Peyser, European critic for the New York Times, who has a keen appreciation of the difference in the way that Anglo-Saxons and Europeans react to opera. Critic Peyser takes an example from Die Meistersinger when David, the apprentice, sings: "Moechtet ihr Nicht Auch die Wurst Versuchen?" In Frederick Jameson's translation, the one used in Cincinnati last week, David's line is: "Here, too, a sausage, would you but try it."

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