Word: debutitis
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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When Kirsten Flagstad in 1935 made her Metropolitan Opera debut in Wagner's Die Walkuere, the audience cheered and the press groped for comparisons with "the irrecoverable magic" of Swedish-born Soprano Olive Fremstad.* Last week another Swedish Wagnerian soprano strode the Met's stage, and this time the comparison was to the "incomparable" Flagstad herself. The debutante: 41-year-old Birgit Nilsson, whose appearance in a new production of Tristan und Isolde touched off the kind of debut furor the Met's Wagnerians have not witnessed in a quarter-century...
...immediate sense of the turbulent passions that animate the role. As the opera unfolded, Soprano Nilsson continued to dominate the stage with such ringing power that she cut without difficulty through the opulent textures of the Wagnerian orchestra-particularly in the climactic Liebestod in Act III. Perhaps because of debut stresses, the voice also had its marked drawbacks; at times it sounded strained, took on a steely glitter when more opulent warmth was called for. Apparently a more severe critic of herself than some of Manhattan's reviewers, Soprano Nilsson said later: "After the first act I was just...
...Conductor Erich Leinsdorf, a Mozart specialist, led the orchestra correctly, but without paprika. Apart from Mezzo Regina Resnik, fine as an old fortuneteller, the only really convincing member of the cast was Walter Slezak, making his Met debut as the pig farmer, Szupán. The son of famed Tenor Leo Slezak, 57-year-old Actor Slezak had wanted to stand on the stage of the Met for as long as he could remember, was delighted when he got his father's old dressing room...
Married. Gloria Davy, 28, Brooklyn-born Negro soprano who made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera as Aida; and Herman Penningsfield Jr., 28, Swiss financier; she for the second time, he for the first; in Bridgeport, Conn...
...Voice, Too. Soprano Moffo's success at the Met caps a career that developed almost by accident. The daughter of an Italian-descended shoemaker, Anna grew up in Wayne. Pa., made her debut at seven, singing Mighty Lak' a Rose in a school assembly program. After that she sang in choirs, school recitals, at weddings and funerals, without ever taking a lesson. When she left school, she turned down a Hollywood offer because she wanted to, become a nun. Later she decided that she lacked a true vocation, won a scholarship to Philadelphia's Curtis Institute singing...