Rationed ho-yo-to-hos

Like a cellar-sitting baseball club looking for a pitcher and a catcher, Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera last week was in the market for an Isolde and a Bruennhilde. The Met needed a top-notch heavyweight soprano to sing these Wagnerian roles, pinch-hitting for Kirsten Flagstad, now immured in her native Norway until the war ends (TIME, June 30, Aug. 4).

The Met's need is more imperative economically than artistically. Chief mainstay of the box office for the past six years have been Soprano Flagstad and gusty, barrel-built Danish Heldentenor Lauritz Melchior. Almost always the pair sold out the house with their hefty love-making in Tristan and Isolde, their caroling and ho-yo-to-ho-ing in the Ring operas. Ordinarily there would be on the Met's Wagnerian bench two sopranos who could take Flagstad's place as Melchior's teammate. But last week it appeared that neither of these would be fully available.

Tall, buxom, St. Louis-born Helen Traubel has one of the finest U.S. heavyweight voices. She would have been ready for her big chance this season, had she known that the Met would need her. But Traubel made 50 concert dates, at $2,000 minimum each, and last week her concerts were 95% sold out in advance. She is contracted to the Met for only half the season.

The other Wagnerian soprano is comely Australian Marjorie Lawrence, famed as a Bruennhilde who actually mounts her horse instead of singing apprehensively by its side. Two months ago Soprano Lawrence was vaccinated for smallpox; paralysis developed. In Hot Springs, Ark. last fortnight she sat up for the first time, then was taken to Minneapolis for treatment by famed Australian Nurse Elizabeth Kenny (TIME, June 23). But it may be six months or more before Soprano Lawrence can mount a stage, much less a horse.

The Met's Wagnerian short rations would be more endurable if, as happened during World War I, the public developed an antipathy to German music. Although Richard Wagner is the great Nazi musical and ideological hero, a survey in Variety last week showed that there is no U.S. reaction whatever against German music. Even Canada can take it. Variety reported that Tenor Melchior, in deference to supposed Canadian tastes, lately omitted German numbers from a recital in Montreal. His audience shouted for German encores, got them.

The Portland Summer Symphony became the first concert orchestra to hire Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy as guest artists. Object: to wipe out a $1,500 deficit. (Failed by $500, because of bad weather.) McCarthy gagged between numbers, did not conduct the orchestra. Said Conductor Paul LeMay, who did: "I wouldn't do it again."

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