The Incredible Jeritza

The Viennese Soprano Who Has Fallen Heir to Caruso's Popularity at the Metropolitan

DEEMS TAYLOR

THE opera season in New York opened on November 15th under the shadow of Caruso's death. Everybody was wondering who would replace the great tenor, and the wiseacres were predicting that his loss spelled the doom of grand opera as a paying undertaking in New York.

For the afternoon of Saturday, November 19th, Director Gatti-Casazza had announced the first American performance of a new opera, Die Tote Stadt, by the youthful Austrian composer, Erich Korngold. It had been written for a Viennese soprano, Maria Jeritza, who had. it was announced, been engaged by the Metropolitan to sing the principal role here. Nobody knew much about her, except that she was a popular prima donna of the Hof Opera in Vienna, and that a few travelled opera-goers who had seen her there had brought back wondrous tales of her voice and beauty.

But travellers' tales had so often proved misleading that only a few among the huge audience that gathered on that Saturday afternoon had any hope of seeing anything but the usual hard-voiced European routinière. The curtain rose upon the first act of Die Tote Stadt. After some preliminary exposition a maid announced that a lady was waiting outside. "'Show her in", sang the hero.

And Maria Jeritza came into her own.

A New Personality

THERE was no applause when the audience first saw that tall, graceful, radiant figure flash upon the dim stage. Instead, one heard the strange, long sigh that a crowd gives when its eyes are startled by some sudden, breath-taking wonder. Later there was applause, and cheering, too. For that afternoon Maria Jeritza achieved a triumph that has not been equalled since Olive Fremstad first took the Metropolitan by storm. New York had found the thing dearest to its heart—a new personality: an opera singer who combined statuesque height and beauty with a voice of glorious quality and power, and was, in the bargain, an actress of extraordinarygrace, emotional fire, and variety of mood. Her stage personality was one of such vitality that it was an exciting and exhilarating adventure simply to watch her. The miracle had happened. Caruso's successor had been found.

Not that the chorus of praise after her first appearance was unanimous. It was all very well, some said, to pronounce her great after a single performance in one new opera. Wait until she sang some role whose traditions had been established by a long line of famous singers. Then we should see of what stuff she was made.

Her answer to that was a performance of Tosca that swept her hearers off their feet. She first sang the role on Thursday night, December first. Her very entrance established a new tradition. The time-honoured Toscas have always appeared in the church scene gorgeously attired in dark velvet and wearing a broad plumed hat. This Tosca wore the palest and most innocent of blue gowns, and her head was covered only by a light scarf. It fell off during the act, leaving her beautiful hair entirely uncovered—an accident that caused many a horrified commentator to reveal an unsuspected familiarity with the Pauline injunctions. Her complete triumph came in the second act. The aria, Vissi d'arte, has always been rather a nuisance. It comes just after Scarpia has named his terms for releasing Cavaradossi, and Tosca, shamed and beaten, has accepted them. Whereupon librettist and composer make the heroine step forward and sing, "I have lived for art, I have lived for love, heaven help me" —or words to that effect, while suspense withered and died.

Jeritza made it one of the high points of the drama. She shrank back on the sofa, from which Scarpia roughly pushed her, so that she slipped off and lay prone on the floor. It was from this position that she began the aria, lying crushed and limp, face downward. She finished it kneeling by the sofa, with her face buried in her arms—a figure of pitiful helplessness and despair. The last few notes were sobbed, rather than sung. Half her audience were in tears. In the scene that followed, culminating in the murder of Scarpia, she rose to heights of emotional acting that have not been approached since Sara Bernhardt played the part on the spoken stage. No one who saw her will ever forget her face as she stood swaying at the head of the table with the silver fruit knife clutched behind her—the horrible, twisted smile that distorted her stiffened lips as she faced Scarpia, the look of terror and awful resolve that shone in her tortured eyes. Scotti played Scarpia that night as he had never played it in his life before. He was in the presence of a great artist, and he knew it.

Jeritza in Wagner

AFTER that Tosca performance there was little talk of her limitations. We merely waited to see what she would do next. On December 16th she sang Sieglinde in Die Walküre. There is nothing spectacular in this part. It is, in fact, rather an ungrateful one. Sieglinde is technically the heroine, simply because without her there would be no Siegfried, but it is Briinhilde who has all the great scenes. A woman who was less of an artist than Jeritza might easily have ruined everything by overacting. Not she. She sang and acted the role with a restraint and simplicity as perfect as it was effective. Her first act Sieglinde was a heroic figure of tireless repose and sculpturesque beauty. When she walked, it was as one of the Elgin marbles might have walked. During the long dialogue between Siegmund and Hunding, when she had little to do but listen, she dominated the entire scene by sheer force of her personality. Like all really great actresses, she is a good listener. In the second act she contrived ever so subtly to mark the difference between herself and Briinhilde. Sieglinde was only a half-daughter of the gods; the rest was a woman, weary, terrified, and pitiful.

On the night of January 6th she sang Elsa in Lohengrin—a creature of dreamy loveliness and pathetic human weakness. Over her head in the first act she wore a white veil that came down around her face like a cowl, so that she looked like a frightened young nun. When Lohengrin appeared, she hid her eyes and ran into the crowd, too happy and terrified to bear the sight of her champion. Her singing in the second act was a marvel of limpid beauty, and the scene with Lohengrin in the bridal chamber was a moment of passionate and wistful tenderness. They stayed to cheer her that night, after the last curtain, until the other singers conspired courteously and charmingly to abandon her before the great drop curtain, leaving her to take three calls alone. It was amusing, and a little touching, to hear stout and dignified pewholders barking "Bravo!" with a fierce, embarrassed intensity that betrayed their surprise and horror at hearing themselves doing such a thing.

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There is little doubt as to her being Caruso's heiress as a popular idol. The house is packed every time she appears. The night she sang Elsa for the first time, the Metropolitan sold out a Lohengrin performance for the first time since Jean de Reszke made his last appearance in the title role. She was originally engaged for only half the season, to leave in February; her success has been so absolute that the Metropolitan management induced her to extend her contract for the full operatic year, so that she will be with us until April.

She is a great artist. It is not altogether easy to describe the secret of her greatness. She is tall, graceful, and beautiful. She has a lovely, warm soprano voice, which she handles well— barring a few slight technical imperfections—and colours with marvellous skill: she sings a role as an, actress would read her lines. She is an actress of tremendous intelligence and subtlety. But the thing that makes her great is something beyond all these attributes. Chaliapin is the only other opera singer I know of who has it. It is a power of conveying a sense of reality in everything she does. When she comes upon the stage as Tosca, or Elsa, you see Tosca or Elsa. For the moment there is no Jeritza, only the character she has become. She says, in effect, "I am Elsa," and you believe it. Instantly and unquestioningly you believe it. This is the mysterious power, that genius of personality which enables a few men and women in a generation to sway the imaginations and emotions of countless others. Eleanora Duse has it. Theodore Roosevelt had it. Napoleon must have had it.

Like all great people, she is simple. Off the stage she is a charming, rather shy young woman, utterly unaffected, and much more concerned with her work than with her press notices. If you are curious about such matters, she is a baroness. Her husband, Baron von Popper, is a banker, and a grandson of the great Marchesi. He is also an expert musician, and has guided her career with skill and intelligence. He keeps a close watch upon her engagements, sees to it that she does not undertake roles that would strain her voice, and refuses to let her sing more than sixty-five times a year.

She has a wealth of wonderful blonde hair, and she looks as beautiful off stage as on—a rare gift? She knows fifty-nine operatic roles, and can sing any of them on, twenty-four hours' notice. Her conversation is limited to German at present, with a few quaintly mutilated English words thrown in. She promises, however, to have English completely mastered by the end of next month.

She is radiantly happy over her success in America—with one small reservation: she has been working so hard that up to now she hasn't had time to go shopping. American singing voices, she thinks, are remarkable. "Never have I heard such voices, especially the women's voices. You have the most wonderful operatic material in the world here; if only there were someone here to tell your young singers what to do."

What she did with one young singer is worth retelling. When she appeared in Die Walküre the part of Hunding was sung by William Gustafson, a young American basso of the Metropolitan, who has a fine voice but lacks Wagnerian experience. "In his scene with Siegmund in the first act," she said, "he kept moving up too close. I told him, 'No, you must stand still,' and showed him how. But I was dreadfully afraid that he would move, after he started singing, and spoil his scene. And so," she explained gleefully, "when the night of the performance came, as soon as he began to sing, I stood on his foot!"