Word: tenors
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...opening night last month a glamorous audience paid up to $25 a seat to hear La Bohème. The performance was doomed from the start. Derisive whistles greeted the tenor's vain struggles for the high notes. After the soprano's first-act aria, a critic cracked: "They call me Mimi, but my name is Brünnhilde...
...last week La Scala Manager Antonio Ghiringhelli brought someone else in. For the season's first performance of Bellini's I Puritani, a Milanese favorite, Manager Ghiringhelli brought back U.S. Tenor Eugene Conley, for whom I Puritani was revived last season. When another singer sang flat in the first act, the audience groaned. But by the time Tenor Conley topped off the difficult third-act duet with a ringing D-flat above high C, audience and critics alike got off their hands...
Naturally, not everybody was happy. Grumbled one oldtimer: "It takes an American to come here and show us again how a tenor should sing...
Gladys Swarthout's fiery Carmen was played without the exaggerated gestures common to the Met's gigantic stage; Tenor Robert Rounseville brought a matinée idol's profile to Don José, but obviously had to work hard to restrain the grimaces that ordinarily go with a big voice. Like all the others, Baritone Robert Merrill as Escamillo had to unlearn one of the cardinal rules of opera-taking musical cues from the orchestra leader. The singers set the musical pace of the show because, roaming their nine sets, they were sometimes 200 feet from...
Almost as big a surprise was 27-year-old Bronx-born opera-saver Regina Resnik (TIME, Aug. 25, 1947), whose dramatically convincing and vocally sumptuous Sieglinde was more than a match for 59-year-old veteran Tenor Lauritz Melchior's Siegmund...