Shadowland (Mar-Aug 1923)

SuADOWLAND nearly twenty years. When Kiss Me Again first came out, nobody thought very much of it ; 1 wasn't crazy about it. nor was the producer, nor was Fritzi Scheflf who sang it. nor was Henry Blossom, of beloved memory. But the public liked it then, and seemingly goes on liking it more and more. That is why these disappointed friends of mine complain, and I shall never he able to satisfy them. For 1 can duplicate a tune, but not the age of it. I confess I am as bad as they. If I were to write an opera tomorrow of which every note would out-Lehar Lehar and every word out-Gilbert Gilbert, and which would take New York by storm overnight, my joy of it would be tame in comparison with my memory of the days when Alice Nielsen sang in The Fortune Teller and the Babes In Toyland scored the hit of their lives. This is all very elegiac, I fear, but it makes one sad to see light opera in the United States falling into such an untimely decline. It would be such a pity to let it die : everybody would far rather it went on living, and there may be some way of saving it, tho the prospect looks far from bright. I believe the principal reason for this unhappy state of things is a financial one. In this respect conditions are not what they were years ago, or what they were still in F.urope until the war ; and by Europe I mean Germany, Austria and France, for Italy has never done very much in the way of comic opera. Austria is far in the lead of all the rest, of course, for to think of light opera is to think of Vienna, with its traditions of the great Strauss families so proudly carried on by the incomparable Franz Lehar. of whom it may be truly said that he stands the undisputed king of all of us today. His exquisite, haunting melodies are known wherever a civilized tongue is spoken ; The Merry Widow, with its grace, its dash and its enchanting music, has become the acknowledged model for most of the light opera which has followed it. The Continental productions are usually lavish in the extreme. In the theaters the orchestras are of symphonic strength, and are composed of highly trained musicians under the baton of such conductors as in this country we have only at the head of important symphony orchestras. \'o wonder Americans came back from Europe before the war to grow rhapsodical over the loveliness of the Viennese scores and their artistic rendition. You can write a full score when you know you are going to have a full orchestra to play it, as well as a chorus with trained voices to sing it. In Europe, they train their choruses; they know girls cant sing with their looks, but here, be it said, we know just as positively that they cant "look" with their voices; and the combination of both is a dream seldom realized. For chic, beauty and lightsome feet, there are no girls in the world to compare with the Broadway choruses, so perhaps the choice is well made after all. Another serious consideration in this country is that both orchestra and chorus have to be well paid, whereas, over there, salaries for these positions amount to mere pittances. P\RADOxiCAi. as it may sound, it is the rise of the symphony orchestra in America which has dealt the heaviest blow to the better kind of light opera. When I first came to New York, symphonic music here was in its infancy. In that day you could have counted all the orchestras in the United States on the fingers of one hand, even if a couple of them had been shot off. Since then, however, these orchestras have become so many and so large that they have absorbed very nearly all the competent orchestra] players in the country. The few they left were in turn recruited by the large movie houses, which provide such admirable music for their audiences. This phenomenal growth of orchestras has produced a two-fold result : on the one hand, the only players remaining in the towns of a stock itinerary are neither sufficiently numerous nor sufficiently expert to tackle a good score ; and, on the other hand, the people's judgment of music has become so educated and so discriminating that they will no longer tolerate inferior performances. Between this Scylla and Charybdis, light opera steers a risky and often a disastrous course. The cost of carrying an adequate orchestra out on the road with a light-opera company is utterly prohibitive. It is terribly expensive to assemble even the exceedingly limited number of {Continued on page 70) Ahbe The Toy Shop number of the Greenwich Village Follies of 1922 Page Twenty-Three