Signals for Curtains Up! sounded last week almost simultaneously in San Francisco and Chicago for another opera season. San Francisco's curtain-raiser was a smoothly-run performance of Halevy's La Juive, in which Tenor Giovanni Martinelli surpassed himself as the bearded old Jew while that plump, dependable songstress, Elisabeth Rethberg, took the part of the heroine who is finally plopped into a caldron, boiled in oil. In Chicago, Soprano Rosa Raisa was condemned to sizzle at the stake in Respighi's La Fiamma, proved her popularity by getting loud applause when neither her singing nor acting...
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