Word: coventionalism
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Last week fashionable Londoners gathered at their Royal Opera House to witness the most pretentious annual event of London's musical life: the opening of the spring opera season (seven weeks) at Covent Garden. As in past seasons, the roster of singers included several names familiar to audiences at Manhattan's Metropolitan, among them Lotte Lehmann, Kerstin Thorborg and Lauritz Melchior. Season's repertory, as at the Metropolitan, showed a distinct accent on German opera, with two complete cycles of Wagner's Ring des Nibelungen as its main feature. Whipping performances into shape were a staff...
When a Londoner hears the words "Covent Garden" he thinks of 1) vegetables, 2) opera. For Great Britain's largest garden-produce market and Great Britain's Royal Opera House lie within a stone's throw of each other on the fringe of London's fashionable West End. And both institutions have the same name. Historically, the vegetables got there first, for the name Covent Garden derives from an old convent garden which occupied the site in the days of many-wived King Henry VIII. Centuries later, in 1732, one John Rich built a theatre where...
Most indispensable of these whippers-into-shape, however, was a bouncing, imperial-bearded British oldster, Sir Thomas Beecham, who has for many years served as Covent Garden's artistic director, England's No. 1 maestro (and one of the six or seven most eminent in the world), Conductor Beecham has been conducting opera and furiously fostering operatic activity for nearly a generation. He has lost fortunes on it, has fed it generously to hungry audiences and stuffed it down less eager throats. A pioneer in presenting new works, he has given Britishers their first taste of more...
Exuberant Sir Thomas can usually be counted on to pull a rabbit of some sort out of his hat. This season's rabbit: an unknown, good-looking, 26-year-old,Polish-born soprano named Margaret Kubatzki. Soprano Kubatzki, making her official Covent Garden debut in a role previously sung by the eminent Kirsten Flagstad (Senta in Wagner's The Flying Dutch-man), created a sensation. Said Conductor Beecham: "One night last October I was turning the various knobs of a wireless ... I heard a magnificent voice. . . . When I went to Germany to make records of the Magic Flute...
...days after a stormy Atlantic crossing, German Opera Star Lotte Lehmann trotted out on the stage of London's Covent Garden * to sing the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier. In the middle of the first act and a high note she stopped singing. Shouting in English "I can't go on," she rushed from the stage, fell in a dead faint. From a stage box stepped the Viennese soprano, Hilde Konetzni, due to make her London debut the next night. Dressmakers hastily pinned up Diva Lehmann's costumes to fit Hilde Konetzni's shorter, plumper figure. Whereupon...