Word: marschallin
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Marschallin, whom Strauss describes as "a beautiful woman of 32 . . . with Viennese grace and lightness," who has "one wet eye" from the loss of her young lover Octavian "and one dry" with sophistication, pretty Soprano Eleanor Steber could not quite make up in tenderness and charm what she lacked in opulence. Contralto Risë Stevens' attractive singing as Octavian was marred only by her unattractive grimacing. Even so, with Veteran Bass Eugene List as Baron Ochs, and with the help of two new imports, Dresden's Coloratura Erna Berger as a pert, brilliant Sophie, and Vienna...
First-nighters (among them: the Metropolitan Opera's General Manager Edward Johnson, some of his staff and stars) started right out applauding H. A. Condell's first-act scenery: his baroque boudoir, hung with Rubensian nudes, could hardly have been more apt. The Marschallin's monologue, sung by Vienna State Opera Star Maria Reining, had them clapping again. But the brightest successes were two U.S.-born girls. One was Virginia Haskins (Sophie), a pert, tiny soprano who made her first hits in the Chicago Opera Co. and on Broadway in Carousel. The other was a shy upstate...
Singing Octavian, the Marschallin's unripe lover, was not 27-year-old Contralto Bible's first operatic excursion in trousers: last year, she made the same kind of hit in her hurried debut as Cherubino in the City Center's fine production of Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro. But she is beginning to hope it may be her last. She has sung the role of Lola in Cavalleria Rusticana and Mercedes in Carmen, but feels that she still has to prove that she can also sing in skirts...
...first time in twelve years she is not singing at the Metropolitan this winter-although in San Francisco she recently sang her greatest role, the Marschallin, in Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier. She regrets that Strauss did not oppose Naziism more actively, but says: "Shall one expect that a great artist is also a great person? I know artists with lousy characters. It is strange that the gift is given sometimes to a shell that is not worthy of it, nicht...
Another grande dame of grand opera packed Town Hall six days later. Busty, strawblonde Frieda Hempel, 60, was history's first Marschallin (she sang it at Rosenkavalier's 1911 premiere in Dresden...