Debuts in Manhattan

In Manhattan, too, Composer Strauss was having his innings. Last winter, the up-&-coming New York City Opera Company successfully revived Strauss's 1912 opera Ariadne auf Naxos, never before heard in New York. Last week, for this fall's first performance of Ariadne, the City Opera unwrapped two shining new stars named Wilma Spence and Suzy Morris.

Director Laszlo Halasz had heard Lyric Soprano Spence in a Broadway production of Franz Lehar's The Merry Widow. When Polyna Stoska, who last winter sang the role of the "composer" in Ariadne, was snapped up by the Metropolitan, Halasz sent for Wilma. He had been watching blonde Suzy Morris* almost as long. "I had already decided that she had the finest dramatic soprano voice in the entire country. She is a young Jeritza. Everybody told me I was taking my life in my hands to produce an opera with two singers who had never in their life sung in opera, but I wasn't worried. . . ."

But after the opera, Director Halasz got even more than he expected. Said the New York Herald Tribune: "There is surely no cause for despair about the future of opera in the U.S. with such gifted fresh talent entering the field." Added the New York Times: "Miss Spence has a voice of both sweetness and power.... Voices of [Suzy Morris'] caliber are said to be almost nonexistent in this country, but here was a singer who produced tones of opulence, power, wide range. . . . Assuming she has some way to get experience, she could be a prima donna worthy of any opera house."

* Sister-in-law of Newbold Morris, Fiorello La-Guardia's heir designate, who ran for Mayor of New York City in 1945 and was defeated by William O'Dwyer.

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