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It will be recalled that "The Jewels of the Madonna" was the opera picked in advance by local wiseacres as the one with which Mr. Gatti-Casazza would probably open the current season at the Metropolitan. As every one knows, these confident prophets were confounded by the uncommunicative Mr. Gatti, who surprised his best critics and severest friends by [beginning] the season with quite a different work, Spontini's "La Vestale." And withholding the "Jewels of the Madonna" until last night.

Some may have wondered why Spontini's not very dazzling Roman candle was chosen for the [first] night festivities in preference to Wolf-Ferrari's much more sensational skyrocket. But the reason should have been guessed by any one who follows with due attentiveness the public avowals of our darlings of the operatic gods. "The Jewels of the Madonna" is, of course, an exceedingly forth putting vehicle for the accomplishments of Mme. Jeritza; and there is reason to suspect that the prominence which is forced upon this admirable artist by her r?le in Wolf-Ferreri's opera is not to her liking.

We are led to this conclusion by the fact that Mme. Jeritza has been quoted as bemoaning the sharply distressing but unavoidable publicity of an opera singer's existence. "Opera singers," she is said to have remarked, "are always in the public eye, and therein lies one of the hardships of our life." That, at least, is what the venerable and venerated "Musical Times" of London, reported her as saying. One can easily fancy her impassioned plea to Mr. Gatti-Casazza not only this season but last (when Miss Ponselle was drafted as the first-night star in "La Gioconda" to spare her the agonizing publicity of a [first] night appearance.

The second night, of course, is easier, and the third night easier still. It may well have seemed to Mme Jeritza that by last night she would have been able to reconcile herself to enduring that painful contact with public observation which she so deeply dreads. And so Mr. Gatti-Casazza, mercifully considerate of his tremulous skylark, may be conceived as having insisted that Miss Ponselle, as the junior star, keep to the assistance of the retiring soprano from Vienna, and assume the burden of the first-night publicity. That, at any rate, is our suggested solution of a mystery which seems to have puzzled some observers.

There was every reason, therefore, to commiserate with Mme. Jeritza last night, for her hour had struck, and, now, for many a week, she will be inexorably delivered to a public which, quite evidently, is still embarrassingly in love with her. If she finds this concentration of the public gaze a hardship, she has no one to blame but herself; for, no matter what she is or isn't as an artist - and we beg leave to view her as an artist of something suspiciously like genius - she has beyond denial the ability to hold the eye.

Like her colleague at the Metropolitan, Mr. Bohnen, she does things at times, both as singer and as actress, which would be unforgivable in a less enchanting artist. But it is all on the side of intensification, of a sharpening of the projected image. It is a mistake to call it overacting, histrionic or vocal excess. It as a very different thing from the facile italicizing of an unimaginative artist; and when it results in an occasional explosion of bad taste, you can only sit back and wait for the disjecta membra of aesthetic breeding to be cleared away, thanking heaven for an interpretive art that may be devastating, but is indisputably alive.

She has an extraordinarily keen and vivid sense of character, and she keeps inside the skin of each of her roles with unrelaxing fidelity. There are not many singers now on the stage who could turn from so beautiful an embodiment as she achieves of Elizabeth in "Tannh?user," to the creation of so antipodal a character as that of the Neapolitan slut of Wolf-Ferrari's opera, and complete it with a like integrity and fullness of realization. She is not quite the sensuous Southern wanton who is implicit in Wolf-Ferrari's text and score; but she is superbly faithful to her own reading of the part, and that is all one is entitled to expect of her.

She is a remarkable and engrossing artist, and it is a pleasure to welcome her back. Last night she appeared more than ever to be virtually the whole of the Metropolitan's performance of "The Jewels of the Madonna." No one else matters very much in its unfolding, and the work itself seems as hollow and derivative and inexpressive as it always has.

The performance benefitted greatly by the substitution of the new Italian conductor, Mr. Vincenzo Bellezza, for the unlamented Mr. Papi. Mr. Bellezza comes to the Metropolitan with a reputation won in various Italian opera houses, and reinforced in London last spring at Covent Garden. He made it evident at once last night that he is an alert and spirited commander. We shall know better what is in him when he tackles music of finer grain than Wolf-Ferrari's gross and trivial score.

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