Word: emperors
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...appeared with him a stocky, wavy-haired man in busi- ness clothes who stood and looked bewildered. The coffee-colored man was Baritone Lawrence Tibbett, the bewildered one Composer Louis Gruenberg. Because Gruenberg had been fascinated by a short, stark play of Eugene O'Neill's called Emperor Jones, because he had hunted O'Neill out one midnight in Paris two years ago, got permission to set the play to music and then proceeded potently to do so, New York had witnessed the premiere of the most exciting U. S. opera yet written. For Baritone Tibbett...
Unlike sexy Strange Interlude and Mourning Becomes Electra, Emperor Jones contains no love motif. O'Neill's hero was a Negro convict, a one-time Pullman porter, crapshooter, murderer, who escaped to the West Indies, called himself Emperor, bled his native subjects until they turned on him, chased him into the jungle and destroyed him. Two grotesque African gods pillared the stage when the Metropolitan curtain went up last week and an off-stage chorus started shouting "He mus' die." Brasses blared savagely against a rattle of percussives. The first short scene made Metropolitan listeners fear that...
Realistically brown, wearing a baby-blue coat, red pants, patent leather boots and spurs, Tibbett sat himself insolently on a red plush throne, put his feet up on the arm, began magnificently to impersonate Emperor Jones. In soft, natural Negro dialect, perfectly suited to the smooth, dark color of his voice, he boasted about how he had fooled the natives, telling them that only a silver bullet could kill him. He boasted about his record back in the States where he had killed two men. broken jail. Then Smithers told him about the savages on the hill. They were molding...
With his superb singing and acting Tibbett made up what the production lacked. "Well, I guess I a'most holds my lead," Emperor Jones panted in the middle of his flight from the ha'nts. If Baritone Tibbett is ever pursued by ha'nts-shades of great bygone baritones-he and the public knew after last week's performance that he had more than held his lead among his contemporaries in his progress towards the high place once held by Giuseppe Campanari, Maurice Renaud, Pasquale Amato, Antonio Scotti. Campanari is dead. Renaud and Amato...
Famed was he for large-scale philanthropies: free medical service to indigent thousands, a hospital ship plying Japan's Inland Sea, a Better Farming Society. He was an ardent archeologist, a connoisseur of native art. For his services to journalism and public welfare, the Emperor made him a peer, gave him the Second Order of Merit...