Grand Opera, properly done, calls for a great deal of energetic tussling, smiting, stabbing, swooning and falling. Grand Opera performers are not artists unless they hurl themselves into the action as well as the music. It is surprising that more artists are not hurt, especially during rehearsals when they are working up routines, yet Grand Opera mishaps are usually more silly than solemn, and provide people with amusing table talk. Metropolitan devotees still chuckle over the impetuous Jeritza who kept falling and singing arias from unlikely positions. Oldsters remember how, in 1905 at the Met, the bridge across which Carmen was...
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