Word: tristan
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...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...
Maestro Artur Rodzinski of the Chicago Symphony took a pratfall by trying to take too good care of himself. He failed to turn up at 11 a.m. for the dress rehearsal of Tristan with Flagstad (see col. 3). He was still missing at 2:30 p.m. When he did appear, after another wait, he was still pale around the gills.. Mrs Rodzinski explained: "He took a sleeping pill that didn't work. Then he took another kind. In the morning he is sick. The doctor say the two kinds create a poison...
...Chicago, much-debated Soprano Kirsten Flagstad (did-she-or-did-she-not-collaborate?) made her postwar operatic debut in Tristan und Isolde, sang them into the aisles, got a blizzard of bravos and cheers, eleven curtain calls, not a tomato from audience or critics...
...also free of the Met's frequent stodginess. The actors did not move like automatons; the story was played, instead of merely being staged as pageantry. By careful auditioning, Halasz picked singers who looked, as well as sang, the part. Says he: "Generally speaking, you know, Tristan was not 50 years old, nor did Isolde weigh 250 pounds." The production, unhampered by clumsy stage machinery, had pace. Halasz had picked up some ideas from Broadway and Hollywood, including pretty girls in the chorus and the use of screen projections for scenery. The Met has snapped...