AN OPERA STORY


The choir at Central Presbyterian Church in Summit has a number of outstanding voices. One of them belongs to Bill Dembaugh, a tenor, who is a retired school teacher.
As a young man, Bill seemed headed in the right direction for a career as a tenor. He studied hard and wound up in New York. Somewhere in his New York experience, Bill concluded that other tenors had better voices and they seemed to wind up with the roles he sought. So he made a choice and became a school teacher in New Providence, New Jersey. Talking to Dembaugh made me think of my sister Verna. Verna had a good soprano voice, but like Bill Dembaugh, she found that other people had better voices.
Now all this thought about Verna encourages me to write about my exposure to grand opera – as we used to call it. That is to distinguish it from light opera. “Naughty Marietta” and “Old Man River” are typical light opera presentations. “Il Trovatore” and “Carmen” are grand opera pieces.
Verna was borne 15 years before I came along. After high school, she aspired to sing opera for a living. She hedged her bets by working as a secretary for the Endicott-Johnson Shoe Company. Verna’s voice was nice and pleasant. It was not outstanding. To make her voice outstanding, she spent a small fortune during the depression with a voice teacher.
So she took countless lessons from a Mrs. Ettinger and she practiced at home between lessons. For an aspiring grand opera soprano, Mrs. Ettinger took Verna in the wrong direction. After several years of lessons, Verna and I both figured out that German music had a very limited future. Verna did not speak German. Unfortunately, that was what Mrs. Ettinger gave Verna to sing. She sang the limited German opera music as well as the folksier lieder. In point of fact, Italian operas greatly outnumber German operas. But Mrs. Ettinger was German and once Verna started with her, she never broke away.
There was a benefit to Verna’s opera career. She spent four or five years in the St. Louis Grand Opera Association as a member of the chorus. I was probably around nine years of age at the beginning and perhaps thirteen at the end. The Grand Opera season offered three productions per year with performances on Friday and Saturday evenings and a Sunday afternoon matineé. Remember these were depression years and no one – neither the customers nor the Opera Association – had money to waste.
Verna was single at the time and lived at home. No one else in the family cared about opera. As a matter of fact, if Verna had not been involved in it, the Carr family would not even have thought about it. It cost too much to see, the location was inconvenient and the language was foreign.
Getting to the grand opera rehearsals and performances posed a bit of a logistical problem. The opera performed in downtown St. Louis. We lived in suburban Richmond Heights, about an hour away on streetcars. At least two transfers on the streetcars were needed to get to the opera.
Getting Verna home from the Kirkwood-Ferguson streetcar stop was a major problem. There was a stop about three quarters of a mile away which involved crossing railroad tracks and their embankment. There was no illumination on that route as it cut across fields. On a cold winter night, it could be challenging. When it rained the problem grew worse. Later a new stop was added about a quarter mile from the house.
From Verna’s point of view the new stop presented major difficulties. The new stop was added on the Kirkwood-Ferguson line to accommodate passengers going to the newly constructed McMorrow Grade School. The school had a large cinder back yard in the direction of the streetcar line. Now I ask underage readers to avert their eyes at this point.
During the depression, men and boys would do anything to own or borrow a car. Without a car, love life with females couldn’t exist. Now once an ardent swain got a relatively willing female in the car, he might drive around looking for a secluded place to park. (To engage in necking or much worse, if you have to ask.) Well, in many cases the ardent swains would drive to the cinder lot in back of the McMorrow School. As they got into their work, many couples would produce blankets and retreat to the grassy spots around the cinder parking lot.
If Verna got off at the McMorrow School stop, which was much closer to our house, she had to wade through this sea of affection and that made her cringe. I should point out that when the opera was in rehearsal or in production, I was drafted to either come to the Opera House or to escort Verna home late in the evening after she got off the streetcar. I rode with Verna to the McMorrow stop or when I met her there, she more or less instructed me to look straight ahead with eyes uplifted so that I wouldn’t see what was taking place. I did this, after a fashion, until one night with my eyes upraised I stumbled over an amorous couple.
I didn’t really mind all this tending to Verna. Sometimes she gave me a dime for my trouble. But going to the Opera House opened up a new world for me. I read about the operas and the featured performers. The stagecraft was entirely new to me and made a lifelong impression.
By the time I was ten years of age I was hooked on Italian opera. Fortunately, there were few German operas to deal with, but the Italians were big deals as far as I was concerned.
Instead of school songs and hits from the Lucky Strike Hit Parade, I began to hum the “Improvviso” from Andrea Chénier or “Il Balen Del Suo Sopriso” from Verdi’s Il Trovatore. There were many others with duets being among my favorites. These are beautiful melodies, much better than something like “Flat Foot Floogie with the Floy Floy” which was played constantly on the radio then.
During a rehearsal, Verna took me to meet Gennaro Popi, the director of the St. Louis Grand Opera Company. Apparently, Popi had many contacts in the United States and in Italy, and one of those contacts brought Giovanni Martinelli to St. Louis on several occasions. For his day, Martinelli was as big as Pavorotti became in the 1980’s and 1990’s. I don’t think I personally met Martinelli, but Verna did. More about Martinelli later – about 35 to 37 years later.
With Verna approaching or being a little past 30 years of age, she decided that marriage was her best bet, and so she didn’t pursue her opera ambitions much longer. Like Bill Dembaugh, it was time to settle for the long pull. Verna made a few dollars singing for weddings and funerals after her opera career was finished. I’m sure she thought she was as good as Lily Pons, but the opera career was not to be.
During the war, I had hopes that I’d hear some first class opera in Italy, but that was also not to be. I saw an occasional opera troupe and a singer here or there, but during the war, the Italians had other things than opera to occupy their minds.
After the war I returned to St. Louis but the Grand Opera Association was long gone. In 1951 I moved to Kansas City which had only a light opera company in the summer. In 1953 I was sent to Chicago where the Lyric Opera Company presented first class opera. In 1955 I came to New York and had an opportunity to see opera, but it was very expensive. From 1966 to 1969 I worked in Washington, but opera was largely unknown there.
So in 1969, I came back to New York. One day one of the secretaries came into my office and laid a photograph down in front of me and asked me to tell her who it was. I suppose she knew that I had an interest in opera.
I didn’t even blink once. I told her, Lois Tancredi – later Reda, that the photograph was of one of my boyhood heroes, Giovanni Martinelli. She was flattered by that, I think. For a number of years, Lois had acted as Martinelli’s secretary when he came to New York. As far as I could tell, this was a labor of love – purely chaste – because Lois liked opera and Martinelli. She had good seats at the Met when he sang and I suppose she attended various functions revolving around opera stars.
I am glad I learned a little about opera not just because it made Lois Tancredi happy. For the better part of 65 years, it has provided me with a sense of pleasure. So I have been amply rewarded for my late night journeys with my sister Verna to the opera and the walk home from the street car. And I still hum Giordano’s “Improvviso” from Andrea Chénier – quietly.
Now a thought in closing about opera. Most operas can be long and tedious. Almost all are sung in a foreign language. The Metropolitan provides an English translation of the libretto on a screen of the back of a seat in front of you. But by the time you have studied the translation, something else is taking place on the stage. So I say “To hell with the translation” and watch the stage.
Now about the length and tediousness of opera. Even my favorite, Umberto Giordano’s Andre Chénier, has four acts. Typically, the cast treats itself to a break between acts of from 30 minutes to three quarters of an hour. Under the best circumstances, that means 90 minutes of downtime. A performance of Andre Chénier will rarely finish by 12:30AM. So it is a long evening.
The tediousness has to do with convoluted plots and the need to present a full cast at work. To my mind, the worst offenders in terms of tediousness and length are German operas. I would rather take a beating than go to see something by Wagner. And he seems to favor dark sets imparting a sense of gloom. So keep me away from German opera.
There is a way to avoid the length and tediousness of opera. And it is a way to enjoy the opera without leaving home. In all operas, the principals in the cast exchange dialogue which is called recitative. It can get pretty boring particularly when the exchange is in French, Italian, German or even Russian. From time to time, a member of the cast stops the recitative and launches into an aria. Arias are, of course, the high lights of the opera. And so for many years, I have collected the highlights of the opera in arias, duets and quartets. The new CD’s offer as much as 70 minutes of music which is plenty to present the highlights of one opera. And so for many years, I have listened to opera highlights without struggling to make it to the Met in person.
Earlier today, I caught myself humming “Inquesta Tomba Oscura,” In This Dark Tomb from Fidelio, a Beethoven opera. Unfortunately, that is the only aria in that opera that is singable. Somewhere along the line, Fidelio was translated from German into Italian which makes In This Dark Tomb easier to sing. Aside from this aria, I am pleased that the Fidelio cast sports three basses and only two tenors. In other operas, tenors outnumber basses by at least four to one. Now that I applaud the Dark Tomb aria and the good supply of basses in Fidelio, I have said about all that I find laudable about German opera.
Well this is the story of my involvement in Grand Opera. My sister Verna died a few years back at the age of 86. She didn’t necessarily intend to provide me with a lifetime of enjoyment in opera music, but that is what she did. And I am thankful.
This add-on to the opera story has to do with one of my Long Lines colleagues in St. Louis. Gordon Gintz knew nothing about opera and did not pretend that he did. He was part of a lunch time crowd looking for a decent place to eat. In 1948, when this episode took place, there must have been five or six ex-soldiers who worked for Long Lines and who often ate lunch together.
We all worked at 1010 Pine Street, the headquarters of the Southwestern Bell Telephone Company. Long Lines rented space at 1010 Pine Street. The leading purveyor of piano and organ sales in St. Louis was the Aeolian Company, on Olive Street, a block or two from our office. Aeolian, also sold sheet music for piano and organs and had recently added phonograph records to its inventory. Aeolian was a high class place. The workers there dressed to reflect the fact that this was a substantial establishment. Men wore ties, ladies wore dresses and the whole place had wall to wall carpeting. Opera music fitted Aeloean perfectly so I bought quite a few old 78 RPM records from them. This was before 33 1/3 records were invented.
The last player in this incident was James Melton. In the late 1930’s through the middle part of the 1950’s, Melton was an important part of the American musical scene. He was a top rated tenor who had a Sunday afternoon radio show for several years. My memory is that Melton had appeared in opera houses in Europe and at the Met in New York. Melton’s heritage was Irish so he often made recordings of Irish music. He was a well known tenor who could pick and choose his appearances.
This incident happened in the Spring, perhaps around Easter. After lunch, Gordon Gintz went with me to the Aeolian Company. I told one of the men there that I wanted a 12 inch 78RPM record of James Melton performing “The Holy City”. That, of course, is about Jerusalem. There is no religious significance for me in asking for this record. I simply thought James Melton had an outstanding voice. If he had recorded “O Sole Mio”, I would have bought that too.
When the clerk turned away to find the record, Gintz said to me in a fairly loud voice, “Jezzus Carr. Why do you always buy Irish music?”
Gintz was active in a Lutheran church and I thought he would know about Jerusalem being the Holy City referred to in that song. At first I thought he was joking, then I realized that he was serious. I assured Gordon that there could be more than one Holy City and that most Irishmen looked to Dublin as their candidate. He never offered an objection.
E. E. CARR
September 7, 2001
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I’ve never been one for opera myself, but I can certainly appreciate the talent it requires. I can also note that both Italian and even German opera both thoroughly trump Beijing opera. Hell, even Flat Foot Floogie with the Floy Floy beats out Beijing opera, and that’s really saying something. I’d suggest that you should investigate ol’ 京剧 (fun fact — we learned how to say this in Chinese before we learned the words for “Please,” “Rice,” and about a million other much more practical words) to verify for yourself, but I honestly wouldn’t wish that on anyone. Suffice it to say that it’s so hideous and garbled, even Chinese people often can’t understand it, so they have to have subtitles to an opera in their own language. This in part happens because Mandarin is tonal, so words need to have specific tones in order to connote meaning, and Beijing Opera, er, distorts these tones.

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