Season's End

Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera last week ended its season with a performance of Wagner's Die Goetterdaemmerung, in which even Bruennhilde's horse joined in the singing, with off-pitch whinnies. For Manhattan can take grand opera for only 16 weeks at a time.

Genial, hard-working Manager Edward Johnson runs the Met with one eye on the box office, the other on the well-heeled, artistically conservative ladies--notably Mrs. August Belmont--who sit on the board of directors. Of the 35 operas performed this season, a good many were routine productions. Facts of the season:

> Wagnerian operas like Tristan und Isolde and Die Walkuere got the most performances (27) because they featured Soprano Kirsten Flagstad and Tenor Lauritz Melchior, who sang respectively 20 and 23 times.

> There were a "novelty" (Gluck's Alceste) and eight operatic "revivals," some of them works which had been out of the repertory a mere three or four years. Best were those conducted by Bruno Walter: Mozart's Don Giovanni, Beethoven's Fidelio.

> Herr Walter conducted the Met's only opera-in-English: Smetana's The Bartered Bride. This was no victory for the vernacular; it seemed tactless to sing it in German, as has been done in the past, and no one but the soprano, Jarmila Novotna, could sing in the opera's native Czech.

> The war claimed its first operatic victim: Wagner's Die Meistersinger, supposedly dropped because of its heroic apostrophes to Germany and holy German art.

The tired scenery, oopsy ballet, timid stagecraft, ruthless mugging of the Met may have irritated operagoers more often than not. But the end of the season brought gloom last week to one of its fans: burly, weather-beaten Joseph Bartnik, traffic cop at the corner. A onetime burlesque-house tenor, Patrolman Bartnik likes to drop in on rehearsals, has had many a pass for Met performances.

Said he to a World-Telegram interviewer, week before the Met closed:

"I am full of music. . . . This stuff here, this Aida and Faust, it's wonderful. . . . My favorite is Lotte Lehmann. She's got a voice. Also this little Lily Pons. Such a little girl and such a big voice. . I like the musical operas. ... I don't usually go too much for the heavy stuff unless this Lehmann is singing it. Then it's all right. . . . It's going to be pretty lonesome . . . won't be nobody to talk to. Traffic will be a hell of a lot lighter, though."

Marian Anderson, 33, patrician Negro contralto, daughter of a onetime washerwoman, won the $10,000 Philadelphia Award (founded in 1921 by the late Edward W. Bok), given annually to the person who does most for the community. Contralto Anderson promised the money to "poor, unfortunate, very talented people."

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