Debs

Hit of last year's opera season in Chicago was a stocky Livornese tenor named Galliano Masini. When he raised the roof in Tosca and La Gioconda (TIME, Dec. 20, 1937). General Manager Edward Johnson of the Metropolitan Opera House heard about it, signed him up. Last week Tenor Masini's Manhattan debut packed the Metropolitan with an expectant throng. Singing his favorite part, Edgardo in Lucia, Masini failed to make quite as high a mark as he had in Chicago. Critics found him no Caruso but a younger, fresher, less-seasoned Giovanni Martinelli.

> Most sensational debut of the Metropolitan's third week was not Masini's, but that of a young (25), good-looking New York contralto, Rise (rhymes with Pisa) Stevens. Contralto Stevens, who studied at Manhattan's Juilliard Graduate School, had spent three years singing at Prague's New German Theatre and at the Vienna Staatsoper.

Last week, in the title role of Ambroise Thomas' archaic Mignon, pretty, dark-haired Rise Stevens showed herself to be much more than a run-of-the-mill operatic debutante, sang with mature taste and acted her part with full-blown operatic temperament. For her, even the morosest critic prophesied an expansive future.

> Most important event of the Metropolitan's week was the revival, after 14 years, of Verdi's Falstaff. To sing its title role, Baritone Lawrence Tibbett donned a five-bushel stuffed stomach and so plastered his face with make-up that only his lips and eyeballs could move. Getting him into his costume took four men an hour and forty-five minutes. Tibbett himself sweated away five pounds during the performance. The audience, delighted by the ingratiating and sophisticated Verdi score, thought the effort worthwhile.

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