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Though she lost her point, Jeritza won San Francisco for her own. The audience jamming Civic Auditorium sat in rapt attention as they saw her transformed from a querulous princess intrigued by a captive prophet into a voluptuous animal crying brutally for the love, the body, the life of Jochanaan. Her Dance of the Seven Veils was lascivious, her entreaties to Herod for the prophet's head brutal and wanton. At the cistern during Jochanaan's execution (unlike Mary Garden in the same role) she was all animal thirsting for blood, listening for death struggle sounds that did not come. When she raised the cloth on the silver platter to kiss the dead lips listeners sat in amazement at the incompatible hate and golden singing. When the curtain swung down on her violent death it was a long moment before a hand was lifted in applause. Then began an ovation lasting a quarter of an hour with repeated curtain calls for Jeritza and Conductor Gaetano Merola.
Jeritza had never before sung Salome except under the personal direction of Composer Strauss. Instead of the usual 30 rehearsals which Strauss insists upon there were but two (which she directed). She had long desired to play Salome in the U. S., but Manhattan's Metropolitan which mostly claims her services has banned it.
Last night Clare Clairbert, Belgian coloratura soprano in her U. S. début, sang coolly, sweetly, well the wanton Violette in Verdi's once frowned-on La Traviata, opposite Beniamino Gigli's capable Alfred Germont.
*The French count separately each backward and forward stroke of the tuning fork's vibration. In the U. S. and Great Britain one vibration is considered to consist of two strokes. Thus the U. S. and British A is 435-45 (one-half the French) vibrations per sec.
† Famed Hungarian conductor at Bayreuth Festivals from 1876 to 1912, great & good friend of Wilhelm Richard Wagner.
*Last week in Paris Paul Roger of the Pathe group was planning the synchronization of Valentino's Blood and Sand, as a test for making dead stars talk, with a Valentino mimic capable of gauging and timing the dialog accurately.