Music: Concert Business

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Because Fritz Kreisler packed up his fiddle and his ailing wife and sailed for Europe one night last week, a group of know-it-alls in New York started one of Depression's dreariest stories. They said the concert business was dead. Even an artist like Kreisler was unable to get engagements. He was returning to Europe with his purse limp and his pride hurt.

Truth was that Mrs. Kreisler wanted to spend Christmas in their Berlin home, that Kreisler wanted to see about the London production of his operetta Sissy before he finished his U. S. tour. What made the know-it-alls' talk all the more absurd was a statement by several New York concert managers to the effect that their business is now on a sounder basis than it has been for two years.

Concerts might be shoes or silver polish for the systematic, hardheaded way they are merchandised in the U. S. New York managers are the wholesalers, local managers the retailers. Sound business means two things: the New York manager has been able to sell a substantial number of dates; and the local managers have been able to sell a sufficient number of seats to make them want to buy again. Artists' fees are lower this year with a few exceptions. So are seats. Bookings are bigger than the New York managers expected. Lily Pons had to turn down 40 dates. Lawrence Tibbett has 51; Kreisler and Rachmaninoff, 33 each; Yehudi Menuhin, 28 (all his parents will let him play); Heifetz, 26, Zimbalist, Harold Bauer and Gabrilowitsch, expert musicians whose box-office power has never been sensational, have in the neighborhood of 30. Nathan Milstein has 33; Nelson Eddy, 37; Rose Bampton, 40. Cancellations were last year's bugaboo. A local manager would engage an artist and then be unable to sell enough seats to meet the fee. So far this season there have been practically no cancellations.

Record tours in the concert business are the ones made by the most successful newcomers of the season before. True to form, the Singing Boys of Vienna have 90 dates this year; Shankar, the Hindu dancer, 85 (TIME, Oct. 30). Record crowds have gone to hear Lawrence Tibbett who fortnight ago was photographed for the first time with his new son*. Tibbett has been kept singing encores for an hour after his concerts were supposedly over. Stage-struck girls have blocked his dressing-room clamouring for autographs. In Seattle and Washington, D. C. he drew the biggest audiences those cities have ever known for a musical event.

Tibbett's success is reminiscent of the boom years, which for concerts ended not with the stock crash but with radio and sound movies which came in at a time when the market was already imperilled by too many second-rate artists. In the boom years Galli-Curci and John McCormack were the big money-making concert singers. They would get 100 engagements a season and they needed no advertising. Phonograph records built up their names, besides earning them royalties which year after year ran over $100,000. Deflation has weeded out second-raters and for the top-notchers the halls are filling up again.

San Francisco's Line-Up