Fifty Years at the Met

Behind the fabled artists in the Metropolitan Opera's long history from Caruso to Nilsson, have stood thousands of other, anonymous singers needed to keep the show on the stage. They were the members of the chorus, providing night after night the necessary Egyptian commoners, the Parisian tradespeople, the Spanish factory girls and Russian peasants.

The 78 singers now in the Met's excellent chorus rarely falter, but when one does, standard procedure is to look for a cue from a buxom, 65-year-old mezzo-soprano named Marguerite Belleri. Says she: "If I cry, they cry. If I smile or attack, they do it, too." Last week, the company's senior chorister was honored for her 50th year with the Met.

With Caruso. While a generation of stars has come and gone, Chorister Belleri has slipped out of the stage door at night after the fall of the great golden curtain and boarded the subway for her home in Jackson Heights, often with a score tucked under her arm. "I always try to look my best on the subway," says she.

"I think, 'Here is our audience, right down here.' " Born Gretl Maerkl in Bavaria, Singer Belleri was signed for the Met in the summer of 1910, while she was still a Munich schoolgirl. When she reported for duty that fall, she was, at 16, the youngest chorus member in Met history, made her debut in the 1910 season in Aida, with Caruso. In those days, the chorus was bigger -- 120 members -- and the newest arrival was paid $24 a week, plus $2 for solos. In the present unionized chorus, Belleri earns around $155 a week and $15 to $30 for solos (although she makes only $5 extra for screaming that Turiddu has been murdered by Alfio in Cavalleria Rusticana}.

Three Regimes. Since that first Aida, Mezzo Belleri (who was married to Tenor Lamberto Belleri, also a longtime member of the Met chorus until his death in 1945) has appeared in more than 100 different operas, often in as many as eight performances a week. And she has witnessed three management changes -- Giulio Gatti-Casazza, Edward Johnson and Rudolf Bing.

Her memories are crowded with the kind of incident that the chorus is usually the first to notice -- and the first to cover up: the time Dramatic Soprano Rosa Ponselle got carried away in the fight scene of Carmen's Act I and yanked two strands of Mezzo Belleri's braids out by the roots; or the occasion, in Liszt's rarely performed Saint Elizabeth, when one soldier lost his tights, causing Conductor Artur Bodanzky to go into such a seizure of laughter that the orchestra had to finish the scene by itself. During half a century, Mezzo Belleri has also developed some unshakable critical judgments. Elizabeth Rethberg was "absolutely the greatest soprano" she ever heard, while Margarete Matzenauer was "the mezzo of the ages." As for Lauritz Melchior, "I will never hear another Lohengrin like his."

As part of her 50th-anniversary celebration last week, Chorister Belleri got a complete set of Metropolitan Opera Annals and the privilege of taking Saturday night off (she promptly took a second-row seat for La Forza del Destino). At a party, General Manager Bing, who has just finished his first decade at the Met, gave her the highest accolade. "Ten years is almost too much for me," sighed he. "How did you ever stand 50?"

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