Word: jeritza
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...same precocity, and a gift for melody. His ballet (The Snowman), composed when he was eleven, was produced in Vienna two years later. Before he was 20 he had written two operas. The Dead City, written at 23, won him fame throughout Europe, and a new star, Maria Jeritza, introduced it at Manhattan's Metropolitan...
...been nine years since Maria Jeritza had sung before a New York audience, but all the old magic was still there. The 3,000 who jampacked Carnegie Hall cheered as they never had before - and many of them had bravoed many an earlier Jeritza performance. As much as anything else, the audience applauded the 58-year-old soprano's apparently in destructible beauty. In a silver-spangled white dress flown East by Hollywood's Adrian, the golden-haired diva looked like the late Jean Harlow in her prime. And when she sang her program of high-powered arias...
Franz Josef's Command. Jeritza, a Moravian, was born Mitzi Jedlicka, a name she glamorized after she became a Viennese prima donna. Emperor Franz Josef, who heard her at the Vienna Volksoper, commanded her to the Vienna Court Opera and gave her the Austrian Order of Knighthood, first class.* For ten years she was the operatic toast of Europe's gayest capital. Her tall (5 ft. 7 in.) figure was as trim as a dressmaker's model, and as muscular as a middleweight champion. For her combined vocal and physical prowess Puccini named her his "greatest Tosca...
...Jeritza hit the Metropolitan Opera like a tidal wave. She sang the Vissi d'arte aria from Tosca lying flat on her face, the Seguidilla from Carmen flat on her back. In The Girl of the Golden West she rode a bronco on stage, and as Thai's she once celebrated her conversion to Christianity with a record high-jump that landed her in the hospital. All this musical whoopla endeared Jeritza to her public, if not to her fellow artists. Snorted Soprano Lilli Lehmann: "If you're a real artist you don't have...
...Morgan's Advice. In Salome, her most sensational European role, Jeritza literally cast off all seven veils. New Yorkers had to settle for less because the late John Pierpont Morgan, a Met backer, had Salome banished from the repertory at the advice of his pastor. This annoyed Jeritza into singing a concert version of the opera, which was at least wanton enough to give New Yorkers a vivid idea what they were missing...