Brave Return

"When the curtain fell on the second act the calm, suave, sophisticated gathering rose in its seats and cheered and shouted and screamed its delight with Mme Galli-Curci, the Gilda [Rigoletto] of the afternoon. Nothing like her had been heard, the audience individually and as a body asseverated, in the six years in which Chicago has had an opera company named for it. ... Galli-Curci, if Saturday's performance be a reasonable measure of her quality, is the greatest coloratura since Sembrich." So gushed the Chicago Tribune in 1916.

Last week, nervous almost to tears, jumpy as a wren, the thin, high-nosed prima donna returned to Chicago where she had scored her first U. S. triumph 20 years ago. Between those two debuts her thrilling soprano had carried her into the biggest headlines and the most profitable operatic berths in the world, and then betrayed her. In front of her larynx a goitre grew for 15 years and checked her wind power, finally reducing it 50%. She lost flexibility, range, box office. She quit the Chicago Opera in 1924, the Metropolitan six years later. In Budapest one night an audience hissed her Violetta in Traviata. She announced she was through with opera, because it was too slow and ungainly for a streamlined age. She embarked on long concert tours, because a concert recital does not strain the voice as much as a night of full-throated Italian emotion. She sang in small and smaller halls, where there was no Lily Pons to compete with. In August of last year, Chicago's Dr. Arnold Kegel gave the enfeebled soprano a local anesthetic, had her trill scales while he cut out of her throat a 6 1/2 oz. goitre.

Even in the hospital, she kept up practicing--a few tremulous tra-las at first; later, in her Los Angeles home, whole arias. She announced that the operation had pulled her voice way down and that she would come back to opera a lyric soprano instead of a coloratura.* No audience ever wanted to applaud a singer's voice more than did the 3,400 who bought out the Chicago Civic Opera House last week to hear Galli-Curci sing Mimi in La Boheme. When the garret door opened upon Puccini's heroine, frail and pathetic in a grey ruffled gown, they shouted and clapped for a full minute. But the applause they gave her later was less shattering, more for her nerve than for her singing. Veterans grieved that her upper voice had crumbled, found her middle register competent but a little breathless. The passages when she caught her old fluency and full tones were too rare to give much hope. While Galli-Curci, cheered by her sympathetic reception, fluttered about her dressing room humming and beaming, critics returned to their desks to write obituaries on a great voice.

Lamented Journal of Commerce's Claudia Cassidy: "That amazing voice is gone, perhaps forever. Instead of cream velvet jeweled with coloratura splendor there is an unsteady little lyric soprano quavering like a sad ghost pleading for reincarnation." Wrote Daily News Critic Eugene Stinson: "She had command neither of voice nor of breath: Panic seized her and for three hours the public watched one of the pluckiest fights the theatre has ever seen. Mme Galli-Curci's vocal estate improved but in the end it had not yet attained a suitable degree of competency." Few days later Critic Stinson heard some records she had made shortly after her failure, crowed: "Galli-Curci CAN sing. . . . There can be nothing wrong with the singing that made these records. They contain the voice which the whole world was waiting to hear last Tuesday."

* Changes of voice are not unheard of in opera.

Rose Bampton, listed at the Metropolitan as a contralto, always sang contralto or mezzo roles there. Touring Europe this autumn, she won fame in 14 cities as a dramatic soprano, made her U. S. soprano debut last week in St. Louis.

Other shifts: Jean de Reszke & Lauritz Melchior, from baritone to tenor. Dramatic Soprano Lilli Lehmann, like Galli-Curci, began as a coloratura.

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