BUT IS IT ART?

As it must to all men--in the phraseology of "Time"--comes the opera season to the denizens of Greater Boston. It is a signal for many time honored customs: for Willa Jerdone and Betty Alden, experts on Society, to go quite, quite berserk in descriptions of what is being worn in the foyer; for the illustrators of department store advertisements to draw countless long necked and apparently under-nourished grande dames; for H. T. P. to polish off some terse enigmatic quips surmounted by the conventional H. T. P. headlines; for music stores to haul out dusty liberties; for discussions of the life and times of Mary Garden; and, lastly, for all good dancing men to come to the aid of the party.

Hidden somewhere in the dark reaches of the Bostoa Opera House (tradition and the sentimentalists say it is the second balcony but occasionally a true aesthete slips unbeknownst into the orchestra) are those who have come really to appreciate and to enjoy the sonorous grandeurs of the opera. For them the occasion is more than a display of what adorns the better vertebrae. And, contrary to fiction, an ability to eat spaghetti and bellow bravo is not a requisite for inclusion in the intelligentsia.

Between the two extremes of complete but magnificent ignorance and intense and concentrated knowledge hovers the average college student. When he attends the opera it is usually for one of several reasons; he is enrolled in Music 4; he has wearied of Menjou; he has sense of duty; or because there has been terrible mistake.