Music: Curtain Call

Home from Europe last week General Manager Giulio Gatti-Casazza summoned Manhattan pressmen to his office in the Metropolitan Opera House, majestically informed them that Verdi's A'ida would open the season Oct. 27. Singers: Soprano Maria Mueller, Contralto Karin Branzell, Tenor Giovanni Martinelli, Baritone Giuseppe de Luca. Conductor: Tullio Serafin. The Metropolitan's season in Brooklyn will begin Oct. 28 with Puccini's Boheme (Soprano Lucrezia Bori, Tenor Edward Johnson); in Philadelphia the same evening with Ponchielli's Gioconda (Soprano Rosa Ponselle, Tenor Beniamino Gigli).

In Chicago the Civic Opera Company did the unusual, chose no well-proven piece for curtain-raiser, no outstanding soprano. For its first night, also Oct. 27, it will present the U. S. premiere of Frenchman Ernest Moret's Lorenzaccio, an adaptation of a carnal plot by Alfred de Musset, with Baritone Vanni-Marcoux singing the title role created by him ten years ago in Paris.

Winter is the usual season for im portant opera but California takes hers in the autumn when famed singers are available. San Francisco and Los Angeles have separate sponsoring associations but the artists headed by Italian Conductor Gaetano Merola are practically the same. San Francisco hears them first, gives her verdict (TIME, Sept. 22). Then, as last week, they move on to the rival city.

Boheme with winsome Queena Mario and pompous little Gigli, Salome, Traviata, Cavalleria, Hansel und Gretel, Manon, Tannhduser, Mignon, Girl of the Golden West, Lucia — the Los Angeles repertoire and reactions were much the same as in San Francisco. Boxofficially Soprano Maria Jeritza was greatest at traction. Gigli got the galleries. Critics were most eager to hear Clare Clairbert, new Belgian coloratura.

The Los Angeles audiences, too, were similar to those upstate. There were socialites and would-be socialites, gowns gaudy and sedate. There was the usual minority of the musically appreciative. But one faction peculiar to Los Angeles was furnished by the film people. Some of them attended the opening of Boheme, but a far greater number waited to marvel at Hope Hampton in Massenet's Manon. In San Francisco she had sung it so badly that Opera directors there were accused of selling her the engagement. It was emphatically denied but criticism stayed bitter, and cinemactors were not surprised for Hope Hampton, not long ago, was just one of them. On the strength of a Texas beauty-contest prize she got her first job in Hollywood as an extra. She soon rose to stardom but the screen could not reveal her flaming orange hair (her one unique characteristic) and she had small success. Wiseacres fell into the way of calling her Hopeless Hampton but that was before she married Jules E. Brulatour, pince-nezed grey-haired film tycoon (Paramount Famous Lasky Corp.), before she had operatic ambitions. Two years ago her debut with the Philadelphia Grand Opera (TIME, Dec. 31, 1928) was said to have cost Husband Brulatour $100,000. She had private rehearsals (at approxi- mately $5,000 apiece) with full-piece orchestra, established singers and a conductor to teach her opera technique. Now in a way reminiscent of her movie past she has equipped herself with a deluge of fantastic publicity. All Los Angeles heard last week that at home in Manhattan she sleeps in a canopied bed, an ermine rug for a blanket, toes always exposed; that she is never seen in public without her husband, has 36 fur coats, wears 14-karat-gold hairpins; that in Europe, where the Brulatours travel as Count & Countess, a Cairo sheik offered her husband four of his choicest wives in exchange for her.

Last Tour