Word: flagstads
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First, massive Tenor Lauritz Melchior publicly denounced Leinsdorf's wayward tempos and lack of experience, found him "not yet ready to be senior conductor of the finest department of the greatest opera house in the world." Next, famed Diva Kirsten Flagstad, who was staying away from the opera house with grippe, hinted to friends that she might not go back unless Conductor Leinsdorf was replaced. It was no secret to the Manhattan music world that Diva Flagstad was backing a favorite young maestro of her own: U. S.-born Conductor Edwin McArthur, who had been conducting all her performances...
Siegfried et al. In the early 1920s, when the late Enrico Caruso died and Soprano Geraldine Farrar retired, the Metropolitan's Italian opera began to limp downhill. But its Wagnerian opera has goosestepped steadily on. When big, blue-eyed Soprano Kirsten Flagstad joined the company in 1935, Wagnerian opera began to boom, played to the biggest box office the Met has known since Caruso's day. Principal drawing card in the Met's Wagnerian productions was Soprano Flagstad's bosomy personality and earth-mother voice. But she could not have done it all by herself. Supporting...
Melchior and Flagstad, as Tristan and Isolde, are a team whose memory will still be green when the present generation of operagoers is old and grey. Tristan and Isolde are opera's greatest lovers, and to thousands of U. S. listeners Melchior and Flagstad are their incarnation. Though that incarnation is only limelight-deep (in private life Melchior and Flagstad are never more than polite, between eruptions of professional jealousy), operagoers are treasuring it while it lasts. For last month Diva Flagstad announced that she would retire at the end of this season. Soon this mortal pair of immortals...
...heroes are strenuous fellows, who would willingly break a blood vessel to get to Walhalla, and Wagner saw to it that their tones should ring with desperate effort. Prince of Heldentenors is Lauritz Melchior. His triple-brass larynx (which earns him the same top Metropolitan pay that Flagstad gets: $1,000 a performance) can stand the wear & tear of Siegfried's "Forge Song" and Siegmund's stentorian "Wälse Wälse" without straining a capillary. But what impresses Wagnerites is his ability to color Wagner's mystical, mountain-glade poetry with just the right shade...
Last week world-famed, 48-year-old Basso Kipnis finally made his Metropolitan debut. Bearded and berobed in the usually boresome part of Holy-Grailer Gurnemanz in Wagner's lengthy Parsifal, Kipnis stole the show from Soprano Kirsten Flagstad, acted not only with his face and hands but with his voice as well. When Basso Kipnis was through with him, Gurnemanz had passed from muscle-bound youth to tottering old age without missing a footstep, and critics assured one another that a finer Gurnemanz had not been seen in a generation...