Mine of Melody

During a span of 30 years, from 1894 to 1924, more than 40 of the musical comedies produced on Broadway bore the name of Victor Herbert. Fashions changed from broughams and leg-of-mutton sleeves to Stanley Steamers and hobble skirts, but the Herbert tunes endured. Radio took them up, made him the composer most played on the air. Last week his estate again proved itself to be a gold mine of melody. In Manhattan his daughter Ella Herbert Bartlett let it be known that she had sold Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer the cinema rights to three of his operettas, The Red Mill, Rose of Algeria, Sweethearts. Price: $50,000 each.

Sale was largely inspired by the success of Naughty Marietta (TIME, April 1, 1935) which served as the first important cinema vehicle for Baritone Nelson Eddy, whose concert audiences have been clamoring ever since for Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life. Hollywood had barely tapped the Herbert catalog before. It used The Fortune Teller as a Spanish short to display the negligible talents of Enrico Caruso Jr. The Red Mitt plot served Marion Davies once in the days of silent pictures. A distorted version of Mademoiselle Modiste called Kiss Me Again passed by practically unnoticed when it was produced in 1931. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer experimented with Babes in Toyland (1934), kept only three of the original Herbert tunes, rearranged the plot to suit Comics Laurel & Hardy.

By keeping faith with the Herbert score, Naughty Marietta did so well that the plan is for the forthcoming productions to be treated with like respect. The Red Mill may seem like an old, old story. But it will send audiences away singing Because You're You, In Old New York, The Isle of Our Dreams. In The Rose of Algeria there will be Ask Her While the Band Is Playing; in Sweethearts, Pretty as a Picture and the title waltz.

From the time Victor Herbert turned to operettas there seemed no limit to the inspiration which prompted one melody after another. The disappointment of his life was his failure to make a lasting name as a serious composer. He wrote concertos, cantatas, symphonic suites, all long forgotten. He wrote two operas: His Natoma was produced in 1911 by the Chicago Opera Company with Mary Garden and John McCormack, survived 38 performances; Madeleine (1914) lasted only four at Manhattan's Metropolitan.

As a cellist playing obscurely in the Metropolitan pit, Victor Herbert began his U. S. career. He had left Ireland in his youth, studied in Germany, taken a job with the Stuttgart Opera when in 1886 Walter Damrosch visited there, offered a Metropolitan contract to Therese Forster, a comely young singer who was to become Mrs. Victor Herbert. Damrosch offered Herbert $60 per week for the sake of signing up the singer he wanted. Mrs. Herbert's heyday was brief. She retired to bear children, grew plumper & plumper, never quite mastered the English language.*

With his sound musical background and his ready Irish charm Herbert was bound to make himself known. Little time passed before Conductor Anton Seidl made him his assistant for the Brighton Beach concerts. For four years thereafter Herbert led the famed Pat Gilmore band, for six the Pittsburgh Symphony. On Broadway he became a legendary figure. His capacity for work was equaled by his Gargantuan appetite for food and drink.

Among musicians and songwriters he was "dear old Victor," always good for a touch. Among critics there was a general regret that he seldom had librettos halfway worthy of his scores. Toward the end of his life jazz dimmed his box-office power, but he went on spending freely, passing out $10 bills as he walked down the street. Death came to him on May 27, 1924. He lunched at his club that day, boasted that he could eat nails. Two hours later he was dead in his doctor's office.

*Two children lived to grow up: Ella Victoria, who as Mrs. Robert Stevens Bartlett lives in Manhattan, and Clifford Victor, who enjoys himself in California.

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