Marjorie's Comeback

Just before the curtain rose on last week's performance of Tannhaeuser at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera, a wheel chair was carefully pushed up to the wings. From it, with great gentleness, a husky stagehand and a medieval huntsman lifted the frail body of a bravely smiling diva, deposited her tenderly on the cushions of a shell-backed fairy-tale divan. Amid a crowd of pirouetting nymphs and satyrs the reclining diva, her blond hair sparkling with stage diamonds, was slowly wheeled on the stage.

She was Marjorie Lawrence, once the most glamorous of Metropolitan Sieglindes and Bruennhildes. She had made her last exit from that stage mounted on a bay charger at the close of Wagner's Goetterdaemmerung on March 22, 1941. Since then Marjorie Lawrence had been fighting a battle few thought she could win. Her antagonist: infantile paralysis.

As the orchestra surged into the Tannhaeuser Bacchanale a hush spread over the backstage throng of greasepainted singers and grimy sceneshifters. The next few minutes would tell the story of Marjorie Lawrence's first comeback in opera. Gesturing from her couch, she smiled triumphantly and sang Venus' lines with a pearly soprano as lucent as ever.

The part of Venus, usually sung by a contralto, had been specially picked for Soprano Lawrence's comeback: it is perhaps the only part in all opera that can be sung from start to finish without having to stand or walk. For a soprano of Marjorie Lawrence's range its contralto depths offered no serious hurdles. She is not content to rest on last week's laurels. After the performance, as she held court in her dressing room, somebody recalled that she had made her Metropolitan debut as athletic Bruennhilde. Said she: "I shall sing that again before very long."

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