FAMOUS QUEEN OF SONG

Evening Star, Issue 21054, 17 March 1932, Page 16

FAMOUS QUEEN OF SONG

STILL SINGING AT SIXTY COMPANY OF ACROBATS TETRAZZINI’S FADED GLORY. Madame Tetrazzini, who a few years ago was the leading soprano of tho world’s greatest opera houses, is to-day singing m a Bostpn picture theatre, of the typo known as “ four-a-day.” The pnma donna, who sang her farewell at the Metropolitan Opera House with Caruso, recently returned to America to share in a variety programme with acrobats, backehat comedians, and talking films. Although she claims to have made £1,000,000 by her golden voice in its prime (says the Boston correspondent at tiro ‘News-Chronicle’), Tetrazzini explains that she has emerged from her retirement because she needs money. Her present vaudeville setting is in ockl contrasts _to the glamorous background of her triumphs at Covent Garden, La Scala, and the Metropolitan. She was at one time paid £3OO for each performance. PHENOMENAL MEMORY GONE. The four-a-day picture house is smartly now and smartly efficient. After tho acrobats have made pyramids of themselves, the,,sleek manager sidles froup the wings to announce in circus terminology this “ engagement extraordinary which the management offers

with pride to its patrons” with Italian expansiveness. The orchestra then blares the triumphal march from ‘ Aida ’ —‘ Return Victorious.’ Black velvet curtains part to reveal the prima donna in a glittering dress of sequins standing beside a piano. At sixty she is whitehaired and very stout, hut beams with good nature. She is fluttering with anxiety to please. Her first offering is 1 Caro Nome ’ from ‘ Rigoletto.’ Although the singer has sung this celebrated display piece with its vocal acrobatics hundreds of times on concert platforms, she is now nervous lest she forgot the words. She would not trust the memory that in its prime was phenomenal. She has written the words on paper which quivers violently in her fingers. ‘ LAST ROSE OF SUMMER.’ Tho writer says;—“lt would bo silly to pretend that Tetrazzini’s voice is what it was, but, though shaking ’with nerves, she successfully negotiates the trills, arabesques, ami top notes of ‘ Caro Nome.’ “ The audience is touched in a way that is probably a little puzzling even to itself. It souses some of the pathos of this stout woman of sixty, who twenty years ago was treated like a queen. That sadness becomes almost unbearable when Tetrazzini breaks into the strains of ‘The Last Rose of Summer.’ In English she sings: ’Tis the last rose of summer left blooming alone, All her lovely companions are faded and gone. “Tears cloud the singer’s voice, the ageing singer almost chokes, then she recovers and smiles gallantly. Could she help recalling that Caruso was dead, Melba dead? Caruso, she says, once asked her to marry him, and she still wears Lis cuff links, watch, and scarf pin. “ Could she help recalling her marvellous debut in New York twenty-five years before, when a crowd of thousands danced in the street outside Hammerstein’s Opera House and pelted her with that summer’s roses?”