The Girl from Wheeling

Vienna had heard of Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera, but it did not expect that a voice which had pleased the Met would necessarily be good enough to please Vienna. The Viennese suspended judgment when they heard that an American soprano named Eleanor Steber, born in Wheeling, W. Va., was coming to town for a lead role in their June music festival. Soprano Steber, making the first continental tour of her career, suspended judgment, too. By last week she was the bit of Vienna.

Steber's test came in a concert-version revival of Richard Strauss's fairy-tale opera, Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman Without a Shadow), and in a soprano role which Vienna's beloved Maria Jeritza introduced to the Viennese in 1919. The story: an emperor on a hunt sees a white gazelle, and when he throws his spear at her, she turns into a woman. The emperor takes her home and makes her his wife. But the new empress does not cast a shadow, and, uneasily, the emperor realizes that his bewitching wife is not really human. By the time Soprano Steber got her shadow (by learning human compassion), she had earned a full ovation from the opera-loving Viennese.

Said Conductor Karl Boehm after the first performance: "America can be proud to have such a singer." Last week, after a repeat performance, the Vienna State Opera announced that the soprano from Wheeling* had been invited to sing in Vienna next year just as much as her Metropolitan Opera schedule will allow. Said Eleanor Steber: "That I was accepted singing Strauss in Vienna is so thrilling that I still find it hard to believe."

* For news of a famed son of Wheeling, see BUSINESS.

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