Music: Old Horse, New Saddle

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As Fanciulla opens, a crowd of gold miners surges into the Polka ("A Real Home for the Boys"), order "veeskey" and proceed to drink a toast ("Veils Fargo!" shouts one sport; "Ip! ip!" reply the miners). The most unpopular man in the place is Sheriff Jack Ranee, who divides his time between lusting after Minnie, the Polka's owner, and pursuing a bandit named Ramerrez. In Act I, Minnie falls in love with Dick Johnson, a stranger in the Polka, invites him up to her place on the mountain only to learn in Act II that he is Ramerrez. When Johnson-Ramerrez is collared in her shack, Minnie proposes a game of poker with the sheriff—with Johnson's life and her own body as the stakes. Minnie takes that game by slipping some cards from her stocking, saves Johnson a second time by flourishing a pistol at the molasses-witted miners, marches off with Dick, singing at the curtain, "Addio, mia dolce terra, / Addio mia California!"

Last week's performance was superb, with Soprano Price handling her warm and lustrous voice impeccably, and infusing the figure of Minnie with a believable passion that might have surprised even Playwright Belasco. Tenor Richard Tucker did an admirable job as Dick Johnson, the silliest role in the opera, and Baritone Anselmo Colzani, the only Italian among the principal characters, swashbuckled through the role of the sheriff like a refugee from Gunsmoke. And although the opera provided few memorable arias (one striking exception: Johnson's "Ch'ella mi creda libero"), it had a score full of surgingly beautiful moments. The weakest links in the production were the cavernous sets, borrowed from the Chicago Lyric Opera; they looked for all the world as if they dated back to Caruso's day.

Social Saviour. To see the Met open its 77th season, the audience paid a record-breaking $94,294.50 at the box office, with orchestra seats going for $45 apiece and an eight-seat box for $650. The crowd was enthusiastic, glittering (inveterate Social Moth Hope Hampton, a onetime operatic hopeful, appeared splattered with sequins, chinchilla and diamonds), but, as Columnist Cholly Knickerbocker reminded his readers, scarcely Top Drawer. The Old Guard, as opposed to Publiciety, celebrates the opening on the second Monday of the season. What saved the night socially, according to Knickerbocker, was the presence of Labor Secretary Arthur Goldberg, whose intervention last summer saved the Met season. Goldberg stopped backstage to congratulate Soprano Price ("I am a connoisseur of music, and I love your voice"), climbed on a sofa during intermission to read a note from President Kennedy: "The discord ended, let the harmony begin."