Exactly Right for Vienna

Four years ago, when famed, onetime Vienna and Metropolitan Opera Soprano Maria Jeritza tried a comeback in Carnegie Hall at 58, Manhattan critics listened, then gave the sympathetic but firm verdict: no. Two years later in Newark, N.J., when she hired a cast to support her in her famous role of Tosca, critics sadly pronounced the same sorrowful judgment. But last week in Vienna, 62-year-old Maria Jeritza, still blonde, blooming and beauteous, was getting yesses that could be heard halfway to the Wiener Wald.

Soprano Jeritza herself insisted that her first appearance at the Vienna Opera in 15 years was not a comeback. She was donating the proceeds of the performance towards rebuilding Vienna's bomb-damaged State Opera House. Whatever the purpose, the Jeritza-loving Viennese queued for 22 hours before the shabby little Theater an der Wien to see her again as Tosca.

When she came onstage in the first-act church scene, carrying flowers, she looked like a faded portrait out of the 1920s. Amidst wild applause, she gazed artfully at the upper tiers; then, after putting her flowers on the altar, she walked slowly to the front of the stage, and kneeling on one knee, bowed to the floor. The ovation lasted for two minutes.

In the second act, when Scarpia (Baritone Alexander Sved) threw her to the floor, he really threw her; Jeritza had insisted on realism. Once on the floor, she sang the famous aria "Vissi d'arte" lying prone as usual.* When Scarpia lifted her to her feet, she pushed him away so hard that the sofa he fell into almost went over backward. In the third act, weeping over the dead Cavaradossi, she managed real tears.

For ten minutes after the final curtain the famed old star tossed flowers back into the audience almost as fast as they were presented to her onstage. The standing ovation stopped only when Jeritza whispered over the footlights in a tiny halting voice: "My beloved Viennese. I am so happy . . . Thank you."

Not even the critics could force themselves to write that Jeritza's singing had been bad. Explained a nostalgic Viennese: "You can betray the Austrian government any time. But to betray the Opera is treason. Nobody would dare do it."

* Puccini, so the story goes, was coaching her in the role in Vienna in 1913. When she accidentally fell to the floor, he cried, "Exactly right! Never do it any other way! It was from God."

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