Word: jagels
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...FESTIVAL (NET, 9-10:30 p.m.) The American premiere of Czech Composer Leos Janacek's opera based on the Dostoevsky novel From the House of the Dead features John Reardon, Robert Rounseville, David Lloyd and Frederick Jagel...
...with Texas dust that he could not sing. Silver, who was already selected for the show, devised a ruse: he put Lanza's name on a label and pasted it on a homemade recording (taken from a radio broadcast) of the Met's Tenor Frederick Jagel singing a Tosca aria. Impressed, Hayes took Mario on. Later, when Lanza could sing the aria himself, Hayes marveled: "You're even better than you were on the record!" Ever since, not content with this version of the story, Lanza has insisted that the record was really a Caruso...
Frederick Jagel as King Herod was the only disappointing member of the cast. Neither his singing nor his acting, which consisted of two dizzy pirouettes across the stage, was anywhere near so effective as the performances of other players. But even this "low" would be pretty high in a less extraordinary performance...
...great care on it: the chorus sang well, Emil Cooper's orchestra did handsomely by Britten's tricky music (the best of his music is written for the orchestra, not for the soloists). But the Met just couldn't break itself of its old habits. Frederick Jagel neither looked nor acted the difficult part of a crude and defiant Suffolk fisherman; he was simply a posturing Wagnerian in a sou'wester. The innkeeper-madam thought the part called for the kind of hand-on-hip coquetry of a road company Carmen...
...instead of grimacing and posturing. There were few in the Met's cast who didn't realize what they were up against. Soprano Regina Resnik is a Britten veteran: she had sung in his Rape of Lucretia in Chicago last year (TIME, June 9). But Tenor Frederick Jagel, who sings the leading role, was worried: "This is so tough dramatically that it becomes tough musically. If I don't watch my step, I end up with my tongue on my chest...