Curtain Up

Manhattanites paused to stare at a familiar free show: ladies in low necks and long skirts, and men in top hats and white ties, all piling out of limousines and taxicabs at the musty, brownstone Metropolitan Opera House. It was opening night at the Met.

Backstage, 29-year-old Yugoslav Soprano Daniza Ilitsch, late of a Nazi concentration camp, nervously awaited the call for her first Met performance as Amelia in Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera. In the pit, a new Italian conductor, Giuseppe Antonicelli, was making his Met debut.

In the Black. During the war the 64-year-old Metropolitan had become the world's leading opera house by default. It would have to earn the honor now, with European houses back in the running. Financially, the Met had never been in better shape. It was even a few thousand dollars in the black. The 3,459-seat house was 85% subscribed, the highest ever. Wagner's "Ring" cycle, one of its biggest drawing cards, will be back on the boards in new trappings. Replacing the dilapidated, 20-year-old scenery for the Ring will be new sets by Broadway Designer Lee Simonson. Some scenes will be done for the first time with screen projections, an economy trick borrowed from the New York City Opera Co. Most of the glamorous old stars--Pinza, Pons, Traubel, Melchior--are back, and 14 new singers, six of them homegrown.

Out by the Reds. Probably the only new opera of the season will be Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes, which had its U.S. premiere at Serge Koussevitzky's Berkshire Music Festival last year. A bigger and brighter premiere--that of Sergei Prokofiev's War and Peace--had been promised, but postponed. Leftists scoffed at Manager Edward Johnson's explanation: that no adequate translation could be made in time. They hinted that the Met was showing its political bias. Actually, a translation had been made which pleased the Met, but was rejected by Russian officials in New York. A second translation was made which the Russians found acceptable, but the Met found unsingable. And there the matter stood.

The Flagstad question was another sour note to Manager Johnson. Ever since she returned from Norway last spring (TIME, April 14), her friends & foes alike had kept the issue hot. It was the Met which gave the great Wagnerian soprano her chance 13 years ago. Said Johnson: "Personally, I think it is a great loss to opera and this company that Mme. Flagstad has not returned. But if you had 7,000 subscribers who blindly agreed to take operas sight unseen at the beginning of the season, and 3,000 of them you knew had a prejudice against Mme. Flagstad's returning, would you take her back?" The answer, to Johnson, was obviously not.

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