Word: schleuter
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Dates: during 1947-1947
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...Last week, looking for someone to fill one big gap, the Metropolitan served up a real Thanksgiving turkey. To share buxom Helen Traubel's Wagnerian roles (so that Traubel could concertize for half the season), the Met had imported a six-foot, 200-pound German soprano named Erna Schleuter. Opposite her, as Tristan in the season's first Tristan und Isolde, was German Tenor Max Lorenz, who had not been heard at the Met since...
...Soprano Schleuter sang bitingly sharp, and with a sickening, undulating vibrato. Tristan's frayed baying could only be heard when Isolde was swooning at half-voice. Minor characters lurched about the stage cataleptically. The orchestra got into the spirit of things by burbling and sputtering. Wrote the New York Times's Olin Downes: "One of the dullest performances of Tristan that we recall, with a new Isolde who is certainly, beyond doubt or peradventure, the worst impersonator of the title part in our considerable experience of the opera...
...cover its embarrassment, the Met offered a surprising explanation: Soprano Schleuter had been signed by the Met without being seen or heard-merely on secondhand recommendations, and the name she had made for herself in Germany's shabby postwar opera. It was a common practice, to pick singers that way, added...
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