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The Metropolitan Opera is an old fogy with antiquated ways. It lives in a shabby, inconvenient old house. Its staging has shown no progress. The same scenery is used again and again. . . . Ottavia Scotto. South American impresario, said all this in effect when he arrived in Manhattan last week on the S. S. France. New York needs a larger opera house, he said, a modern one, with cheaper seats.
Criticisms and prescriptions on the order of Impresario Scotto's have simmered and boiled in Manhattan all season. Many have thought that Radio City offered the logical cure. A new Metropolitan would be built there in another two years, they prophesied. But the Metropolitan appears to be of a different mind. The property belongs to 35 conservative parterre-box-holders who are unwilling to sell out at Depression prices and unwilling, many of them, to let Metropolitan traditions be swallowed up in John Davison Rockefeller Jr.'s new commercialized enterprise. Radio City officials, tired of the Met's indecision, let it be known lately that opera of some description would be given there whether the Met came in or not. Leopold Stokowski announced that the Philadelphia Grand Opera would come over and give guest performances (TIME, Jan. 11). Chicago's Herbert Witherspoon conferred secretly with Samuel Lionel ("Roxy") Rothafel. Then there was a hint that the Chicago Civic Opera Company might also come on for occasional visits.*
Meanwhile the rumor persisted that the Metropolitan was so hard hit financially that it might have to curtail its present season or disband in the spring. Banker Otto Hermann Kahn, some said, resigned as board chairman this autumn because he was tired of playing patron. But people who believed that knew little of the Metropolitan's workings. Banker Kahn owns from 70 to 80% of the producing company's stock but, contrary to the impression he sometimes gives, he has never "backed" it in the sense that Mr. & Mrs. Harold Fowler McCormick once backed Chicago's Opera or that Louis Eckstein now personally backs Ravinia. For more than 20 years Impresario Giulio Gatti-Casazza has run New York's opera and managed to enhance its prestige without incurring a deficit. He presents each season several new operas and the world's highest priced singers. He even built up a reserve fund which carried him through last year when seat sales started to fall off.
A new Swedish soprano made many forget all these mumblings & grumblings last week. She was Goeta Ljungberg (pronounced Zhöta Yungberg), tall, blonde, beautiful. For her debut she sang Sieglinde in Die Walküre as if she really believed that sisters sometimes met their brothers far from nowhere, loved them instantly and consumingly.
Soprano Ljungberg's voice has lovely subtle tones but is not strikingly powerful for a Wagnerian's. It was only a medium-sized voice when on her eighth birthday she sang for the Queen of Sweden, got five crowns because she had "gold in her throat." She spent the five crowns on cakes and milk for her school friends. In Stockholm's singing academy she learned German (she calls it Yarman) and the German operas. She acquired superstitions. The right foot must come out of bed first in the morning, the right stocking go on first. If a costume is so designed that the left arm must go in first, even today the great Ljungberg spits