Two Fine Glorias

Conductor Nino Sanzogno explained to his cast at Milan's Piccola Scala that the Italian premiere of Kurt Weill's Mahagonny would have to include some English lyrics: the bitter logic of Bertolt Brecht's libretto demands them. The cast did its best with a baffling array of polyglot lines ("Good morning, caro Signor Jack O'Brien!"), but when it came to singing "Worst of all, Benares is said to have been perished by an earthquake," the chorus sensibly defected. "Guarda qua Benares, e state messa giu da un terremoto," sang the mutineers, leaving American Mezzo Gloria Lane to go it alone in English.

But such linguistic collisions did not deter a genteel, bejeweled audience from giving Mahagonny a 30-minute ovation, despite the opera's fiercely stated argument that all wealth is wicked. "Rich Italians now consider it very smart and refined to like Brecht and Weill," one critic humphed, and another suggested that all the fat cats clapped only to confuse spies from the tax collector's office. But the curtain calls had nothing to do with socialist realism. Instead, they were a tribute to Gloria Davy and Gloria Lane, two American singers who made Mahagonny a triumph in any tongue. "A fine pair of Glorias," said Corriere Delia Sera's man, giving Lane, at least, new reason to ponder her expatriate career. "Every two-bit American singe'r who has appeared in Europe has been engaged by the Met," she said. "I have a voice, experience, a reputation, and I'm a Jew. What more do they want?"

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