Word: operas
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Dates: during 1940-1940
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This small, jolly opera might well get lost in the majestic spaces of the Met. But Viennese-born Stage Director Herbert Graf and Rumanian Scene Designer Jonel Jorgulesco, besides framing the production with its own curtain, brought the four brightly-colored sets as far down stage as possible. Ladislas Czettel designed gay costumes to match Lily Pons's, which was run up by famed, high-priced Dressmaker Valentina. To the military in the original libretto Director Graf added 24 high-stepping vivandieres, explaining: "You cannot think of a regiment with Lily Pons in it without having more female soldiers...
...notable achievement of the Met's Manager Edward Johnson has been to hire lookers as well as singers. No other opera house of comparable artistic standards boasts such svelte and glamorous ladies as Czech Soprano Jarmila Novotna, Brazilian Soprano Bidu Sayao, U. S. Sopranos Helen Jepson, Grace Moore, Hilda Burke, Rose Bampton and Eleanor Steber (a West Virginia debutante of this month), U. S. Contraltos Risë Stevens and Gladys Swarthout...
...career, in which she was not a great success, she sang arias 50 times running without a murmur of complaint. Lily Pons hates champagne, drinks little wine, likes Coca-Cola, touches hard liquor and cigarets not at all. She still feels faintly seasick all day before a concert or opera performance...
Within a year Soprano Pons made her debut, in 1928, in the provincial French opera of Mulhouse, Alsace. Her voice was heard in a few more second-string opera houses-Cannes, Vichy, La Baule-and, still unknown in France, pricked the ears of a couple of tourists. They were Maria Gay, an oldtime opera singer, and her husband Giovanni Zenatello. They took up the innocent Lily, promised her an audition at the Metropolitan. Within a few months Lily Pons was taking 16 Metropolitan curtain calls in Lucia, 30 a few nights later in Rigoletto. Later the Zenatellos sued...
...Frieda Hempel, as Marie, interpolated Keep the Home Fires Burning in the opera...