Word: damrosche
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Since it was the first novelty in the Metropolitan spring season, The Man Without a Country was bound to be well attended. Interest was doubled by the fact that it was the collaboration of two famed and well-loved U. S. oldsters, one 75, the other 65. Walter Damrosch wrote the music, Arthur Guiterman the libretto...
...Composer Damrosch began to conduct the New York Symphony and Oratorio Societies 50 years ago, kept the former until 1927, year before it merged with the Philharmonic, founded the Damrosch Opera Company and made $53,000 the first season. He made himself nationally famous by his lectures on Wagner, is still active with a children's music hour on the radio. Arthur Guiterman, whose verses in oldtime Life and elsewhere were for a generation as much of a U. S. landmark as the drawings of Charles Dana Gibson, still publishes skittish poems, but has in recent years tried more...
Last week neither Damrosch's music nor Guiterman's libretto could make their two-act opera entirely successful. Ignoring the possibilities of a rip-snorting plot, the score abounded in old turns and phrases, was at its best when it borrowed obviously from Wagner. Set songs were brought off skilfully but they often sounded banal. The text was happy, fitted the music better than most U. S. operas permit. Since opera needs a soprano, Authors Damrosch & Guiterman interpolated a new character, Mary Rutledge, as Nolan's sweetheart. When Philip is tried by a military tribunal, she nervously...
White-maned Walter Damrosch rehearsed and conducted his opera with great vigor, took curtain calls along with Poet Guiterman. In a cast that sang as freshly as any this season, particular credit went to Helen Traubel of St. Louis for a powerful-voiced Mary. Arthur Carron sang Philip expressively, looked so little the romantic part that forthright Critic Danton Walker of the Daily News felt his sentence of banishment should have been a bread-&-water diet...
...Cincinnati Zoo, Mrs. Alice Roosevelt Longworth had the keeper bring a 6-ft. king snake from the new reptile house, calmly fondled it as it coiled about her neck. "It never occurred to me to be afraid of them," shrugged she. who as a girl visited Walter Damrosch (see p. 47) at Bar Harbor with a green snake, Emily Spinach. Impressed, said Keeper Joseph A. Stephan: "Snakes know people who understand them. Mrs. Longworth does. The snake acted as if it were in the hands of an old friend...