Alda on Alda

"Dressed in my costume as the Venetian courtesan in The Tales of Hoffmann, I looked for all the world like one of Casanova's memoirs. . . . Thunderous applause and generous bravos (some of these, I suspect, for my extremely feminine thighs and legs, well shown off by smooth. skin-tight trunks in my third-act costume.... I knew that four of my beaus were in the audience. Each one had carefully let me know where he would be sitting. The impulse to play a little joke on them all was too much for me. As the opera went on, I proceeded to sing passionately to each in turn.... I preferred roles that allowed me to make a feature of my curves, since, apparently, I couldn't avoid having them. . . . King Edward induced me to try to play golf. . . . But after a few trials I found my arm too short and my bust too big for me to develop the proper swing, I decided God hadn't built me the right shape for action on a golf course, and I gave up."

As memoirs of operatic divas go, one in which the author admits she is plump, is not too boastful about herself or too jealous of her peers, is on its face noteworthy. Such a volume (ghosted by Dorothy Giles) is Men, Women and Tenors* by Frances Alda. Long a capable Metropolitan Opera Soprano, first wife of Impresario Giulio Gatti-Casazza, Mme Alda launches her book with much of the triumphant, glassy-smiling air of a diva squaring off at a high C. Says her introduction: "For 50 years (everyone from the radio announcer to the Motor License Bureau knows my age)--for 51 years, to be exact/---I have been enjoying tremendously the adventure of being alive. I have had success and failure; and, perhaps, more than my share of fame in an art that I love passionately."

Besides mentioning one of her four beaus by name (Lord Robin Innes-Ker), Mme Alda reveals that "my marriage to Gatti was frankly, on my part at least, a marriage after the European pattern; a sensible arrangement between a man and a woman who liked and respected each other. . . ." Her opinion of her successor, Dancer Rosina Galli: "Like me, she had a rather pretty face but too fat a figure." Alda declares that, when she made ready to divorce Gatti-Casazza, she was told that her contract at the Metropolitan would be allowed quietly to expire. Astute, she obtained from the late Otto Kahn* a promise of a year's contract so that she could announce her "farewell." But Mme Alda also insists that she and Gatti remained friendly, that he visited her home on the last day he was in the U. S.

Alda on her contemporaries: (Geraldine Farrar): "She and I were never friends." (Enrico Caruso): "His voice and mine blended so completely that they became one voice. The voice of humanity--male and female--joined into one." (Marion Talley): "If ever a child had a God-given voice, that girl had it. But intelligence about using it? That's something else again." (Maria Jeritza, who she says asked her for voice instruction): "No. You and I are friends now. But if I started to teach you we wouldn't be friends. Let's leave it at that." (Ganna Walska, who made the same request): "Learn to cook. You'll never be a singer."

*Houghton Mifflin ($3.50). /-To be more exact, 54 years, according to two standard directories of musicians. *Mme Alda says that Art Patron Kahn never gave the Metropolitan 5-c-, that neither he nor any other Jew could own a parterre box therein.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.