Career No. 2

The singing teacher at Stockholm's Royal Opera School had little fault to find with the little tenor's singing; what annoyed her was the tenor's persistent wooing of her pet pupil, pretty, blonde Soprano Anna-Lisa Berg. Marriage, she told them sternly, would be the end of Anna-Lisa's promising operatic career. She was right. Young, golden-voiced Tenor Jussi Bjoerling and Anna-Lisa were married. And while Jussi sang his way to the Metropolitan and world fame, Anna-Lisa set-to work to raise their family, instead of her voice.

That was 15 years ago. In the summer of 1948, the late Count Folke Bernadotte asked Jussi to sing at a P.ed Cross benefit opera performance in Stockholm. He also asked Anna-Lisa if she wouldn't like to sing again. Anna-Lisa thought it over: their three children, Anders, 12, Lars-Olof, 10, and Ann-Charlotte, 5, were all out of infancy; she decided to try to pick up her promise of a career. Jussi and Anna-Lisa sang La Boheme together at the benefit--so successfully that Stockholm's Royal

Opera House engaged them for four more performances.

Last week a Carnegie Hall audience heard Anna-Lisa and Jussi sing together for the first time.

When Anna-Lisa, still slim and pretty at 38, sang her first aria, from Puccini's Gianni Schicci, her bright-colored soprano was tight and quivering with nerves. It loosened up in arias from Gounod's Romeo and Juliet and Charpentier's Louise. By the time she had sung duets from La Boheme and Romeo with Jussi, she had proved she had something more than a talented amateur's equipment, if something less, after too many years away from public singing, than a professional way of using it. She would get a chance to correct that: Jussi's manager had signed her to tour the U.S. with Jussi next season.

At the peak of his career at 39, jolly-jowled Tenor Bjoerling (pronounced Bee-yorling) was one of the first singers to be engaged for next season at the Metropolitan Opera, his ninth season. Even so, he is not his wife's favorite tenor: in her catalogue of greatness, Jussi comes after 60-year-old Beniamino Gigli. Jussi, who has been called the "Swedish Caruso"--inaccurately because his voice is colder and lighter in color--says, "That's all right, Gigli's my favorite too." He never heard Caruso. As a boy of nine he toured the U.S. in the "Bjoerling Male Quartet" with his father and two brothers; while they were singing in Manhattan, the father bought four tickets to hear Caruso. The boys all went off to a Bill Hart Western movie instead.

Jussi is looking forward to getting a few hints on histrionics before he sings on opening night at the Met next November. His assignment: the title role in Verdi's Don Carlos, with Broadway Shakespearean Director Margaret Webster doing the directing and giving Jussi the hints.

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