Say yes

On this day in 1928 soprano Grace Moore made her Metropolitan Opera debut as Mimi.

Harold A. Strickland in the Daily Times:

Puccini’s perennially popular setting of the tale of the Latin Quarter served yesterday afternoon as the debut vehicle for another budding prima donna. Just as Mary Lewis last season made her entrance on the Metropolitan Opera Company’s stage with the role of the ill-fated consumptive, so another musical comedy chorus girl yesterday utilized the same assignment to make known her formal connection with the company.

For Grace Moore, Tennessee beauty, choir singer and daughter of the town’s most influential citizen amid the plaudits of friends who crowded the 39th Street auditorium, graduated from the chorus of a Broadway production to a stellar role and yesterday made the final leap to membership in the Gatti company.

Her state’s Governor was absent-detained on official business, according to his party. But Senators and Congressmen and politicians and lesser lights were there in abundance and the Misericordia Hospital for whose benefit the matinee was held, garnered in the shekels.

With such a setting it would be most desirable for music reviewers to go into ecstasies concerning a coming young artist-but truth must prevail. The debut was not a success from a technical viewpoint. Admittedly the newcomer was nervous. She was stilted in her acting and her voice had much difficulty in scaling the heights; even in the middle register it was far from clear.

On this day in 1792 Cimarosa’s Il Matrimonio Segreto premiered in Vienna. Birthday anniversaries of writer Charles Dickens (1812), tenor Galliano Masini (1896), conductor Carlo Felice Cillario (1915) and artistic administrator and writer George Lascelles, 7th Earl of Harewood (1923)