Word: welitsch
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...Europe last summer, General Manager Edward Johnson* thought he had found the right singer: magenta-mopped Bulgarian Soprano Ljuba Welitsch, of the Vienna State Opera. Last spring, when pudgy little Fritz Reiner left the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra in a huff, Johnson knew he could get the right conductor, too. Even 84-year-old Composer Strauss agreed with that. From Montreux, Switzerland, he wrote to Reiner, who had first conducted Salome under his stern gaze in Dresden 33 years ago: "That is good news. There are plenty of others who can do Brahms and Bruckner. Opera needs men like...
When buxom, 35-year-old Soprano Welitsch bounced into rehearsal, singers and musicians alike picked up more glow. Actress as well as singer, she seemed to know how Strauss's libidinous, necrophilic Salome (based on Oscar Wilde's play) should be portrayed. Says Welitsch with rapid gestures to head, heart and torso: "To sing Salome, you have to have something-here and here and here...
...orchestra could try to keep out of sight), they heard the power, brilliance and detail of Strauss's music as they had seldom heard it before. Onstage, they saw an incandescently evil Salome, flashing in green, purple and red, who commanded the performance from beginning to end. Soprano Welitsch had critics reaching back for comparisons to Olive Fremstad, who sang (but did not dance) the U.S. premiere of Salome in 1907. And she carried the rest of the cast into the spirit of the thing with her: even though some of his voice has gone to Valhalla, Wagnerian Tenor...
...Walter had refused invitations to perform. Instead the opening-night audience listened to 6 ft. 2 in. Hans Hotter, a Munich Opera baritone, sing a roughly hewn but virile hero in Mozart's Don Giovanni. The cast included a promising, pretty, 30-year-old Bulgarian soprano named Ljuba Welitsch, who was the hit of the Vienna opera season in Salome. Don Ottavio was sung by Yugoslav Tenor Anton Dermota, whose performance was uneven, but at its best better than any Don Ottavio that Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera has heard in years. Eight years of Hitlerism had not destroyed...