REAL AND REEL LIFE

Taranaki Daily News, 26 October 1935, Page 20 (Supplement)

REAL AND REEL LIFE

EXPERIENCE OF GRACE MOORE. ’TWO DEBUTS. IN GRAND OPERA. (By a Special Correspondent); Seven years, almost to the day, after Grace Moore made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York, singing the role of Mimi in Puccinni’s “La Boheme,” she again made her debut in the Metropolitan Opera Housesinging the same role in the same opera. The first was a performance from real life. As a thoroughly frightened young girl she faced New York’s critical opera audience and sang the plaintive role of the beautiful little, modiste. Seven years later, in “reel” life, she simulated the same frightened young girl, in the role of a young singer making an operatic debut under circumstances as highly dramatic. In “Love Me Forever” Grace Moore i§ seen as a singer who finally wins the coveted honour of performing in the historic and famous Metropolitan. When she stepped on the stage which housed the Metropolitan set at Columbia Studios she could not restrain a gasp of amazement at the accuracy with which technicians had duplicated the interior of the famqps playhouse. When the curtains parted and she entered the garret setting to sing the duet with Michael Bartlett, as Rodolfo, in the first act of “La Boheme,” her voice faltered and tears'filled her eyes. She could not go on with the scene for some minutes. “The scene brought back such memories,” she said. “There was the famous overture which I had faintly heard in the nervous moments which I had before the time came for me. to step on the stage and sing. It brought back the remembrance of the days, weeks, months and years I had struggled for the chance to sing at the famous “Met.” When I entered the stage setting, Rodolfo’s garret studio, and heard the opening bars of the duet, it was such a page from real life that I was momentarily overcome! And when the curtains parted and there before me stretched what might have been a typical opera first night audience packing the auditorium, and the famous ‘Diamond Horseshoe’ stretching back into the darkness, the illusion was overpowering!”