Word: mcarthur
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...week at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera. This popular team had impersonated Wagner's potion-bibbing lovers many a time before. But this time Tristan was an event. In the pit was the Met's first U. S.-born, U. S.-trained conductor, sandy-haired, bespectacled Edwin McArthur...
...into that pit, McArthur had come a long way. As a piano prodigy in Denver, he made money for music lessons by selling magazines on street corners, picking berries at 2? a quart. In high school, young McArthur played the typewriter; his virtuoso prestissimo won him the Colorado championship. Then he turned accompanist and vocal coach, for Ginger Rogers and Ethel Merman as well as for concert artists like John Charles Thomas, Gladys Swarthout and, finally, Soprano Flagstad...
...time, cigar-smoking (box-a-day) McArthur studied orchestra scores, practiced waving a stick before a mirror. An ear-splitting singer, he made his wife, his onetime singing pupil Blanche Victoria Pope, his stand-in vocalist in his studies. Flagstad plugged him as a conductor (TIME, Feb. 5, 1940). The San Francisco and Chicago operas hired Conductor McArthur; last year the Met unbent and let him do a Tristan in a post-season visiting performance in Boston. But not until last week did the Met let him play in its own back yard. Critics gave Edwin McArthur top marks...
...afternoon, in open-air Federal Plaza, 25,000 people heard the San Francisco Symphony play U. S. music, with such composers as Howard Hanson and William Grant Still conducting their own pieces. Edwin McArthur conducted Deems Taylor's Circus Day. The amplification was tinny, airplanes zoomed, firecrackers popped, a military band zing-boomed past but everyone thought the concert was swell. The evening shindig filled the Coliseum (capacity 15,000) and Festival Hall (3,000), left more than 5,000 people clamoring outside. For the 33 numbers on the program, ASCAP and Tin Pan Alley had shot the works...
Wagner: Love Duet and Liebestod from Tristan, Brünnhilde's Immolation from Götterdämmerung (San Francisco Opera Orchestra, Edwin McArthur conducting, with Kirsten Flagstad and Lauritz Melchior; Victor: ten sides). Souvenir of a great operatic team which may soon be heard no more (TIME, Jan. 22). Conductor McArthur's shyly reticent accompaniment keeps it from being as good as it should...