Word: tristans
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...Died. Tristan Bernard, 81, large-nosed, spade-bearded "last of the boulevardiers," Parisian novelist and playwright; of a heart ailment; in Paris. Besides 50-odd novels, Bernard wrote more than 40 musicals and plays, most of the latter successful, none profound, all witty. His Exile was probably the shortest play ever staged...
...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...