Word: lauritz
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Home. The Met survived the Depression on the box-office pull of Kirsten Flagstad and Lauritz Melchior. Now doing better business than ever under General Manager Rudolf Bing, the yellow brewery ranks with La Scala and the Vienna Staatsoper as one of the Big Three of the operatic world. The Met is hampered by a physical plant that was antiquated in 1910 (to be abandoned in three years for the Met's new home in Lincoln Center) and by the difficulties of competing for top talent with the state-supported European houses. But in addition to its European stars...
...jacket clogged with enough medals for a NATO division, Wagnerian-size Tenor Lauritz Melchior chatted with Denmark's King Frederik IX at a celebration in Copenhagen of the Royal Guard's 300th anniversary. A guardsman himself in his nimble youth, Melchior crossed the Atlantic for a month's vacation in the old country with a 40-man delegation of Danish-American Guard grads, sang out loud and clear at the parade and at a festive veterans' dinner in the Tivoli Gardens...
Back from Denmark to resume his one-man show, this time in Los Angeles' Greek Theater, puckish Pianist Victor Borge happily described his newly purchased, 237-year-old castle near Copenhagen as "larger than Lauritz Melchior, although smaller than the Waldorf-Astoria." Called Frydenlund, the place has no ghosts or battlements (he says it qualifies as a castle because four Kings have lived there), but it does have a 1,600-tree apple orchard and a lot of modern orchard equipment, which he calculates will pay for itself "in exactly 216 years...
...befits a man who has spent much of his professional life expiring at the top of his voice (he has logged 227 hours of dying time in Tristan alone), Siegfried-sized Tenor Lauritz Melchior knows his deathbed bathos down to the last Cheyne-Stokes wheeze. When bandits hopped the fence of his Beverly Hills estate last week, bound him with neckties and began looting the place, the 67-year-old Dane huffed and puffed like a heart-attack victim, sagged to his chair in feigned death throes (Tristan und Isolde, Act III) to frighten them off. Said...
...Moedl (as Brünnhilde), Wolfgang Windgassen (as Siegmund and Siegfried), and Marianne Schech of the Munich Staatsoper (as Sieglinde and Gutrune). All three gave occasionally fine performances, but no one of them dominated the stage in the spacious manner of a Kirsten Flagstad, a Helen Traubel or a Lauritz Melchior. The most consistently good performances, both vocally and dramatically, were supplied in the supporting roles-Norman Kelley as Mime, Blanche Thebom as Fricka and Waltraute, Jean Madeira as Erda. What really held audiences, however, was the Wagnerian power of the Met's orchestra, conducted once by Dimitri Mitropoulos...