Word: halasz
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Something of an operatic figure him self, New York's late Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia wanted to start a people's opera. Four years ago he did - the non-profit New York City Opera Company -and hired an unsung director named Laszlo Halasz to run it: he was the only applicant who had no pull. But he id have push - enough push to start a small operatic revolution...
Director Laszlo Halasz had heard Lyric Soprano Spence in a Broadway production of Franz Lehar's The Merry Widow. When Polyna Stoska, who last winter sang the role of the "composer" in Ariadne, was snapped up by the Metropolitan, Halasz sent for Wilma. He had been watching blonde Suzy Morris* almost as long. "I had already decided that she had the finest dramatic soprano voice in the entire country. She is a young Jeritza. Everybody told me I was taking my life in my hands to produce an opera with two singers who had never in their life sung...
...after the opera, Director Halasz got even more than he expected. Said the New York Herald Tribune: "There is surely no cause for despair about the future of opera in the U.S. with such gifted fresh talent entering the field." Added the New York Times: "Miss Spence has a voice of both sweetness and power.... Voices of [Suzy Morris'] caliber are said to be almost nonexistent in this country, but here was a singer who produced tones of opulence, power, wide range. . . . Assuming she has some way to get experience, she could be a prima donna worthy...
...Halasz's audiences talked through his overtures and drowned his finales with spontaneous applause. In the last act of Tosca the guns of the firing squad failed to go off, and the hero was obliged to drop dead in silence. In Carmen a soldier tried desperately to get his sabre into his scabbard the wrong...
...most of Halasz's singers sang well and some of them very well. Its rows packed with enthusiasts including Du-binsky's garment workers and Curran's seamen, the City Center bulged with sold-out houses. But by week's end Mayor LaGuardia's marked-down opera found itself in a situation familiar to its high-priced rival, the Met: it had lost substantially at the box office...