Firehouse Coloratura

Soprano Roberta Peters, 23, was just sitting down in the hairdresser's shop one morning last week when the phone rang.

It was a message from the Metropolitan Opera, warning that she might have to substitute for an ailing Susanna (Nadine Conner) in that night's performance of Mozart's Marriage of Figaro, and advising her to go home and rest up. Pretty Roberta went home, all right, but not to rest; she had never sung the opera, had not even studied it for five years. She called in a relay of coaches, who put her through the plot, brushed her up on the endless chatter of Italian recitatives, reminded her of the Metropolitan's new stage layout. At 5:30 she was polishing off a preperformance steak ("If I don't eat, I feel weak before the show is over"), and at 6:45 was going over some crucial musical points with Conductor Fritz Stiedry. "I told him--I mean asked him--to have confidence in me."

Musically, nobody needed to worry. Coloratura Peters has a voice of exceptional purity and the kind of confidence and musicianship that critics like to call aplomb. Onstage for almost all of Figaro's 2 1/2-hour performance, she skipped through Susanna's role without blowing a cue, delivered herself of some of the sweetest-sounding high notes to be heard anywhere. The packed audience loved her and the press next day agreed. "A direct hi., ' said the Daily News.

Last-minute substitutions are something of a specialty with Roberta. She made her Met debut as a fillin, Zerlina in Don Giovanni, three years ago. Since then she has answered several other fire calls, including two for Gilda in Rigoletto (for Hilde Gueden and Genevieve Warner), one for Adele in Fledermaus (for Virginia MacWatters). But Soprano Peters is more than a high-class fireman.

With Lily Pons singing less often (she sang the 100th Lucia of her career last month), and with Patrice Munsel dividing her time between the Met and her child, young Roberta is carrying a veteran's load of soubrette and coloratura roles.

Besides, she gives concerts, appears on TV, has made a movie (Tonight We Sing), and has an invitation to sing at Milan's La Scala. Finally, she still manages to cram in a voice lesson every day.

Bronx-born Soprano .Peters likes it that way. For a brief three months she was married to Met Baritone Robert Merrill, but thinks for the present that marriage and the intensive work of a young career soprano do not mix. Last week, after her impromptu success in Figaro, Soprano Peters went off to a celebrative late supper of spaghetti with clam sauce with her father, her mother and her music teacher.

--Although the Figaro performance got good notices, the Met had a pretty rough week. Critic Virgil Thomson of the Herald Tribune took aim at the impressionistic new stage set with which Rudolf Bing & Co. have tried to brighten Don Giovanni, and let go with both barrels: "In this presentation, Don Giovanni lives just across the street from Donna Anna, but she does not recognize him when he tries to rape her ... All this residential proximity turns the story into a news item about how two ladies got rid of a criminal neighbor."

Next night the Met gave its sixth performance (in two years) of the only contemporary composition in its repertory, Igor Stravinsky's Rake's Progress, which has cost the Met more than 60,000 hard-won dollars to mount. Reported Critic Olin Downes of the Times: "The opera suffered the worst fiasco that we have seen occur at the Metropolitan in 30 years of attendance there." Only a slim crowd turned up in the first place, and "by the end of the second act, people were leaving in scores ... It is clear that the public has tired of this opera and by no means without justification, in view of its immense stretches of empty and artificial music . . " Downes held out one crumb: the enterprising Met had given a poor opera "a fine performance."

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