Music: McArthur Swings the Stick

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Soprano Kirsten Flagstad and Tenor Lauritz Melchior, who are none too fond of each other professionally, sang Tristan und Isolde one night last week at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera. This popular team had impersonated Wagner's potion-bibbing lovers many a time before. But this time Tristan was an event. In the pit was the Met's first U. S.-born, U. S.-trained conductor, sandy-haired, bespectacled Edwin McArthur.

To get into that pit, McArthur had come a long way. As a piano prodigy in Denver, he made money for music lessons by selling magazines on street corners, picking berries at 2¢ a quart. In high school, young McArthur played the typewriter; his virtuoso prestissimo won him the Colorado championship. Then he turned accompanist and vocal coach, for Ginger Rogers and Ethel Merman as well as for concert artists like John Charles Thomas, Gladys Swarthout and, finally, Soprano Flagstad.

All the time, cigar-smoking (box-a-day) McArthur studied orchestra scores, practiced waving a stick before a mirror. An ear-splitting singer, he made his wife, his onetime singing pupil Blanche Victoria Pope, his stand-in vocalist in his studies. Flagstad plugged him as a conductor (TIME, Feb. 5, 1940). The San Francisco and Chicago operas hired Conductor McArthur; last year the Met unbent and let him do a Tristan in a post-season visiting performance in Boston. But not until last week did the Met let him play in its own back yard. Critics gave Edwin McArthur top marks. And this week's McArthur Tristan sold out.