Music: Swiss Bass

Because Basso Michael Bohnen wanted to return early to Germany to make a sound film, Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera Company imported on short notice another Wagnerian bass, introduced him last week in Götterdämmerung, concluding opera of the Ring cycle (TIME, Feb. 17). Despite the fact that the new singer's name is Siegfried, like the Götterdämmerung hero's, he is no German but a Swiss, with the surname Tappolet. Only 26, he has already attracted enviable attention in Geneva, Stuttgart. Mannheim. Last week's performance brought him still further prestige for, while lacking the commanding personality of Basso Bohnen, he sang his music in a full, effective voice, acted the role of the dark, grim Hagen in a manner so satisfactory that for many it stamped his Metropolitan debut as the season's best.

Shrewd Vagabond

Since it became possible for millions of the plain people to hear, elect and exalt their favorite minstrels overnight, it has become suitable for these favorites to cap their professional careers, within a few months of their arrival at the broadcasting station SUCCESS, by publishing their memoirs. It was little more than two years ago that the son of a village druggist in Maine first sent his smooth young voice floating out to the enraptured ladies and envious gentlemen of the radio audience. Yet already, longlipped, wavy-blonde-haired Hubert Prior ("Rudy") Vallee of Westbrook, Me., the Paramount Theatre, Brooklyn, and the Villa Vallee, Manhattan, has passed so far into sentimental history that he and his managers consider the time ripe to put his autobiography on sale.*

The word and idea "vagabond"—lazy, casual, and (as he sings it) amorous in a far-off sort of way—has been curiously persistent in Vallee's technique, is almost the Vallee trade-mark—Vallée's vagabondia. His admirers may be surprised to discover from his self-revelations that his life has been anything but lazy, casual, or amorous. He ran away from school at 15, enlisted in the Navy. After that he helped in his father's store, ushered at the village theatre, bought himself a saxophone. Shrewd, he taught himself fine points of technique by aping Saxophonist Rudy Wiedoeft on the phonograph. Thence his nickname, bestowed by mates at the University of Maine. He transferred to Yale, worked his way through (including coonskin coat) by playing at dances. In 1927 he started his career as a full-fledged jazzman. In May he married but this is suppressed in his autobiography, perhaps because the marriage was annulled after three months, perhaps because a professional love-crooner publicizes better as an untrammeled soul. Just one of his current contracts (Fleischmann Yeast) is for well over a thousand a week (one hour of broadcasting) for a year.

Reading what he has to tell about himself, students of contemporary phenomena and throbbers over the owner of "The Voice with a Sob in It" will be interested in such Rudy Vallee views of Rudy Vallee as the following:

"I could have led, as many other saxophone leaders do, with much hopping around, moving of the saxophone and bodily shimmies, but at the risk of failing completely, I continued to play in an attitude of simple dignity. . . ."