Word: stage
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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When Kirsten Flagstad in 1935 made her Metropolitan Opera debut in Wagner's Die Walkuere, the audience cheered and the press groped for comparisons with "the irrecoverable magic" of Swedish-born Soprano Olive Fremstad.* Last week another Swedish Wagnerian soprano strode the Met's stage, and this time the comparison was to the "incomparable" Flagstad herself. The debutante: 41-year-old Birgit Nilsson, whose appearance in a new production of Tristan und Isolde touched off the kind of debut furor the Met's Wagnerians have not witnessed in a quarter-century...
...looked like a handsome Viking figurehead. In the long, angry denunciation of Tristan that followed, she displayed a big, flashing, vibrant voice that galvanized her audience and conveyed an immediate sense of the turbulent passions that animate the role. As the opera unfolded, Soprano Nilsson continued to dominate the stage with such ringing power that she cut without difficulty through the opulent textures of the Wagnerian orchestra-particularly in the climactic Liebestod in Act III. Perhaps because of debut stresses, the voice also had its marked drawbacks; at times it sounded strained, took on a steely glitter when more opulent...
...production as a whole was less exciting. German Tenor Karl Liebl, substituting as Tristan for the ailing Ramon Vinay, had neither stage presence nor the power to match the Nilsson salvos. Baritone Walter Cassel as Kurvenal and Bass Jerome Hines as King Mark both turned in workmanlike performances, and Soprano Irene Dalis was impressive as Brangaene. Conductor Karl Boehm led his orchestra through a methodical reading. As for the decor, with the world's best to choose from, the Met had again picked the second-rate. The sets by German Designer Teo Otto were pedestrian and confusing: starkly realistic...
...never writes for the concert hall. He places such importance on the texts of his "dramatic cantatas" that he will permit none of them to be translated, although he himself seems intrigued by foreign idioms. When working on Oedipus, he decided to write the musical directions in Italian, the stage directions in Latin, e.g., the entrance of the two children is signaled by the line "Inducuntur Oedipodis liberi Antigone et Ismene...
Died. Edna Wallace Hopper, about 85, tiny (5 ft., 83 lbs.) turn-of-the-century musical star (The Girl I Left Behind Me, Floradora) who devoted her later years to preserving her youthful looks; of pneumonia; in Manhattan. When age finally forced her to leave the stage in 1920, Edna Hopper underwent a series of face-lifting operations, had a movie made of one of them, which she took on a lecture tour around the country. The lecture, which included a personal demonstration of how to take a bath properly, invariably played to a full house (women only), swelled sales...