Word: firsts
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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When Maria Jeritza first came to the U. S. one of her great enthusiasms was for Wild West cinemas. In Vienna, Jeritza's home, one of her most successful roles is Puccini's Girl of the Golden West. What more natural, despite the fact that the opera failed miserably when given in Manhattan with Emmy Destinn and Enrico Caruso in 1910, than that Jeritza should want to give her version in Manhattan, that General Manager Giulio Gatti-Casazza should bill it as the first revival of the new season...
...barmaid named Minnie is heroine of the David Belasco play which Puccini adapted. She keeps a saloon in a California mining camp, reads the Bible to drunkards, guards their money. Among them is Sheriff Jack Rance. He loves her, but Minnie, by the end of the first act, prefers Dick Johnson, outlaw in disguise. Rance obtains proof that Johnson is the bandit Ramarrez and tells Minnie. The big scene occurs when she confronts Johnson with her knowledge and drives him out into the storm. He is wounded just outside the door and she drags him in again and hides...
...Johnson) had suffered and sobbed in the best Italian manner. Baritone Lawrence Tibbett (Jack Rance) was more credible, but looked funny in an Abraham Lincoln makeup. It was Jeritza who raised the performance above incongruity, saved the plot from appearing like any cinematic melodrama. She made comedy in the first act out of dishwashing, in the second out of tight slippers and a "company" costume. Then when the card scene came she loosed the energy which makes her Tosca famed and, despite Puccini's feeble music, created ten tremendous breathtaking minutes. The third act was noteworthy only...
Three singers made debuts during the Metropolitan's first week. Mezzo-soprano Eleanor La Mance of Jacksonville, Fla., a thin-legged, hollow-voiced girl, was "a musician" in the opening Manon Lescaut, sang her one aria nervously. Alfredo Gandolfi, who might have been any pot-bellied Italian tenor, was "a sergeant...
...another Harvard Hall, banquet room of the Boston Harvard Club, there were assembled, one night last week, some 400 members of the Yale and Harvard Clubs of Boston, the Yalemen guests of the Harvardmen. Each alumni body had brought along its university president. All understood it to be the first meeting of its kind in history...