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A wise impresario presents no operatic novelty on an opening night. A fashionable audience likes to come late from dinner parties, leave early for supper parties. Guilio Gatti-Casazza knows his Manhattan audiences after 23 years of sphinxlike observation. This week he gave Verdi's Traviata for his opener, Traviata with tunes so taking that they demand no concentration from the audience, tunes that Conductor Tullio Serafin gave a new, glancing charm, that Baritone Giuseppe De Luca (a round Pere Germont) intoned with real sympathy, that Tenor Giacomo Lauri-Volpi (Alfredo) for once refrained from singing piercingly to the gallery. Soprano Rosa Ponselle was the evening's heroine. Her Lady of the Camelias, unlike her other roles, is not convention-bound. Soprano Lucrezia Bori has more of the porcelain charm in keeping with the Victorian costumes but Ponselle gave the role a dark, full-blooded warmth. Rich, sombre tones served marvelously to show her distress. Coloratura passages such as few dramatic sopranos dare undertake won her storms of applause.
Ponselle, 14 years ago, was singing four times a day in vaudeville but she was not the only singer at the Metropolitan's 47th opening who was conspicuous for her success. Prominent in the Diamond Horseshoe sat Anna Case, daughter of a New Jersey blacksmith. Anna Case used to sing at the Metropolitan also. This evening she appeared for the first time as the wife of Director Clarence Hungerford Mackay. Inconspicuous in the orchestra sat big, shaggy, beaming Lawyer Paul Drennan Cravath, hearing his first performance as chairman instead of dapper Banker Otto Hermann Kahn.
Cicero for Maecenas-Sudden, unhinted was the announcement last week that Otto Kahn had resigned as chairman of the Metropolitan Opera Company for the perfectly logical reason that the death of Partner Mortimer L. Schiff makes it necessary for Partner Kahn to give more time to the affairs of Kuhn, Loeb & Co. Talk subsided somewhat when it became known that Mr. Kahn would continue as the Opera Company's majority stockholder, that conservative Lawyer Cravath. succeeding him as chairman, would "keep the same policies."
The policies which Chairman Cravath means to preserve are undoubtedly these: The Board has utmost confidence in Manager Gatti-Casazza, who has complete control over artists and production, runs his house with a shrewd eye to breaking as even financially as possible. Lawyer Cravath does not pretend to the musical sophistication which is Banker Kahn's. Mr. Kahn came from a wealthy, cultured family of German Jews. Cravath, son of an Ohio Congregationalist minister, worked his way through law school, worked hard to make his firm (Cravath. deGersdorff, Swaine & Wood) the esteemed counsel for such huge corporations as Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Co., International Harvester, Bethlehem Steel, Radio Corp. of America, Paramount-Publix, Baltimore & Ohio R. R.