Curtain Up in New York

The mob that choked the Metropolitan Opera's 39th Street entrance came early, and wasn't disappointed. From glossy limousines stepped glossy fine ladies, dragging their tails behind them. The place was fuzzy with ermine, mink, diamonds and dignitaries. There was a shout, "Here comes Lily Pons!" followed by a buzzing ("Yeah? Didn't know she was a blonde"). The Widow Betty Henderson, showoff of cafe society, who got tapped for the front page of all the tabs last year by stretching her 71-year-old leg on a table in the bar, arrived with a raspberry-colored hairdo.

Margaret Truman, the lioness of the evening, showed up fresh and glowing in white satin and orchids. She and her hosts --the family of Thomas J. ("Think") Watson--arrived 20 minutes after the curtain belatedly rose. After all this, the Metropolitan Opera got down to what it tried hard to regard as the point of the proceedings, Verdi's Otello.

For the first time in its 64 seasons, the Met faced a double audience on opening night: the 3,459 seat holders, and an estimated 2,000,000 who watched every move on television.* After a summer of uncertainty and criticism (TIME, Aug. 16 et seq.), the Metropolitan's management was anxious to please both.

Veteran singers who for years have been getting by on their voices alone nervously consulted their dressing-room mirrors, daubing on brown face paint (their usual bright red doesn't televise well). To look his best, Tenor Ramon Vinay turned up in the purple burnoose that famed Actor Edwin Booth wore as Othello.

When the great gold brocade curtains parted, the two audiences could see & hear for themselves that the Met hadn't really changed its ways. The opening storm music that the Met's best conductor, Fritz Busch, whipped out of his pit orchestra was only faintly furious. Tenor Vinay sang powerfully, and what top notes he couldn't sing he shouted. But Booth's burnoose could not disguise his lurching, hand-wringing acting. Like most Met stage lovers, he more often sang of his passion to Conductor Busch, at whom he stared fixedly, than to Desdemona. The Bronx's burly Leonard Warren couldn't have sung the role of lago with more splendor and imagination--or acted it with less. Soprano Licia Albanese, in her first Met Desdemona, was fine in her lyrical moments in the Willow Song and the magnificent Ave Maria; but as a dramatic soprano, she lacked enough voltage to electrify the house.

Opening nights, with all of their fuss & feathers, were traditionally no fair test of the Met's ability. As the week wore on, critics found some things to applaud more heartily: the season's first Goetterdammerung, the sound and spirit of Conductor Wilfred Pelletier's orchestra in Mignon, Cloe Elmo and Jussi Bjoerling's Il Trovatore, and the excitement of Tenor Ferruccio Tagliavini's L'Elisir D'Amore.

*For what they saw and how they liked it, see RADIO & TELEVISION.

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