Maggie Teyte Comes Back

The tiny English soprano trilled like a bird and danced on legs as dainty as the Philadelphia opera house had ever seen. The applause for the voice and the legs (the year was 1911) was heard from coast to coast. After that, for ten publicity-filled years, blue-eyed, 5-ft Maggie Teyte was America's operatic sweetheart. Her life, as gay as a light opera, came to its operatic climax when she married a millionaire and retired to luxurious obscurity in England.

Last week chestnut-haired Maggie Teyte, 56 but still vivacious, returned to the U.S. to tour in a new role. She starts with a July 23 appearance on NBC's Telephone Hour and she has a large and enthusiastic audience waiting--but not the nostalgic audience of yesterday. Her waiting fans are a young generation of phonograph-record connoisseurs, who for the past five years have prized her records of 19th-Century French songs. Many of her new fans are unaware that Maggie Teyte has ever been in the U.S.

Failure & Success. "She effaces the memory of stouter prima donnas," wrote one critic during Maggie Teyte's barnstorming years with the Chicago Opera, the Boston and La Scala Opera Companies. Her favorite roles as Melisande in Pelleas and Melisande, Hansel in Hansel und Gretel, set off her charms to best advantage. Photographs of Maggie Teyte in knickers and sleek satin gowns with gold slippers were treasured items in the dens of U.S. dudes. Women crowded counters for "Maggie Teyte Perfume." But when she failed to snare a Metropolitan contract, Maggie Teyte shrewdly decided that her clear-toned, brilliantly controlled voice was better suited to chamber singing than to opera.

She turned to the slight, gemlike songs of Debussy, Berlioz and Faure. After her divorce in 1931, she toured England and France with Pianist Alfred Cortot. She sang so artfully that listeners who knew no French thought that they knew what she was singing.

By 1942 she had recorded three albums --French Art Songs and Songs by Debussy (Victor), Song Recital by Maggie Teyte (Gramophone Shop)--which spread her fame to the U.S. Now Maggie Teyte will see whether her studied musicianship will stand her in as good stead as once her pretty legs and elfish personality did. Says she: "There are many compensations in age . . . for serious music I can even let my hair down."

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