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The curtains parted on the second act of La Bohème: the square outside the Café Momus, in Paris' Latin Quarter. A colorful crowd, self-conscious and unconvincingly hearty as most opera-players pretending to be real people, swarmed over the stage. The poet Rodolfo strolled in happily with his sweetheart Mimi, but his painter friend Marcello was in the dumps, and sang (in Italian): "Bring me an order of poison." He had just heard the jaunty voice of his faithless Musetta, who soon flounced in, all feathers and finery:
As through the streets I wander onward merrily, See how the folks look round, Because they know I'm charming, A very charming girl. And then 'tis mine to mark the hidden longing And all the passion in their eyes; And then the joy of conquest overcomes me— Every man is my prize!
At Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House one afternoon last week, sparkling young Soprano Patrice Munsel warbled those waltz-time lines as if they had been written for her. When the curtain closed on the act, operagoers gave her an ovation. Backstage in her dressing room, Patrice Munsel grinned happily. Said she: "I love an audience!"
No Three-Ton Tanks. Patrice has loved audiences ever since she was twelve, when she played to her first one in Spokane, Wash. But it took her 13 hard years to make the love affair mutual. Last season she fairly stole the show as the saucy maid Adele in Fledermaus. Her flashing Musetta last week—her first time in the role—proved that she has reached the top of her operatic class. General Manager Rudolf Bing, a man who likes understatement, calls her a "superb soubrette—probably without competition at the moment."
At 26, slim but full-figured, Patrice Munsel is typical of a new kind of grand-opera star—as un-European, as American, as Ethel Merman or Mary Martin.* In European opera, with its polished Viennese, its lyric but undisciplined Italians, its meticulous Germans, there is nothing quite like her.
And—a fact that greatly pleases U.S. operagoers—she represents a new trend in opera. As Conductor Tibor Kozma says: "Operagoers no longer will stand for three-ton tanks in the roles of innocent 15-year-old girls, or singers who stand in front of the prompter's box and do their daily dozen. They want acting. They want dramatic realism. Munsel and some others are representatives of a young generation of singers who are really singing actors." Patrice's manager, Sol Hurok, says with box-office candor: "You can listen with your eyes open."
Impresario Hurok, whose eyes are seldom shut, has a more-than-esthetic interest in Miss Munsel. Eight years ago, listening at his radio one afternoon to the Met Auditions of the Air, he heard 17-year-old Patrice singing coloratura arpeggios in a voice as full of rills as a country brook, and lustily topping off high Fs. It was not the greatest voice he had ever heard, but coloraturas were scarce, particularly with Lily Pons, the Met's coloratura queen, making herself scarcer on wartime tours. Hurok went to see Patrice, and liked what he saw—a confident, warm-eyed girl with black, wavy hair and a brilliant smile.