Friend & Foe

The Metropolitan Opera's under-lunged Italian tenor wing has been huffing & puffing, in a vain attempt to bring the house down, ever since 1941. That was when the Met's Swedish mainstay, Jussi Bjoerling, was refused a transit visa to cross Nazi-occupied countries. Bjoerling stayed in Sweden, packed the red and gold Royal Opera House in Stockholm. Last week 34-year-old Tenor Bjoerling reached the U.S. by plane, the first European artist to return to the Met's roster since the war began.

Punishments. Bjoerling, a neutral, was one of Europe's few front-rank musicians who got through the war without either suffering or collaborating with the enemy.

In Paris last week a tribunal of musicians, including Paul Paray, conductor of the Paris Colonne Symphony, Violinist Jacques Thibaud and famed Catalan Cellist Pablo Casals, got set to try French musicians who danced to the Nazis' tune.

Still in their minds was Adolf Hitler's triumphal visit to Paris in June, 1940. He nursed three ambitions: to sign the armistice at Compiegne, to visit Napoleon's tomb and to enjoy a performance of the Paris Opera. Hitler and his entourage were solicitously shepherded around the Opera by agile, gypsylike ballet master Serge Lifar and the massive pro-German Wagnerian soprano, Mme. Germaine Lubin. Next night the opera company put on a command performance.

Six months later Pianist Alfred Cortot visited Berlin, shortly thereafter left his job as professor of the Ecole Normale de Musique in Paris to become Vichy's secretary for music. He signed an order banning Jews from all orchestras in France. Madame Lubin is now in a collaborators' concentration camp near Bordeaux; Lifar and Cortot are under house arrest.

Across the Alps, Dutch Conductor Willem Mengelberg, permanently barred from the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra (TiME, Aug. 13) for conducting German orchestras, is living alone near St. Moritz rather than return to face the music. At Lake Geneva gray-haired Wilhelm Furtwaengler, conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic and Goering-appointed Nazi Staatsrat of Prussia, is writing a symphony. In Wiesbaden, bald Pianist Walter Gieseking played twice for U.S. Army audiences before someone got wind of his wartime collaboration. He was promptly forbidden to make another appearance.

Rewards. For those who resisted Nazi favors, things were looking up. Both Casals and Thibaud, waiting for the tribunal to meet, were passing their time concertizing in France, Switzerland and England. Conductor Paul Paray, who defied Cortot by resigning from the Lyon radio symphony rather than fire Jews, announced that he was off to the U.S. to conduct the Boston Symphony.

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