Metropolitan Opera Archives

Wagner's "Lohengrin" was performed at the Metropolitan Opera House last evening for the first time this season. It served to introduce Herr Heinrich Vogl, one of the tenors of the company, and a Wagner singer of experience and repute. He has been suffering from sickness since his arrival in America, and cannot fairly be said to be at his best yet. Nevertheless he made a favorable impression last evening and bids fair to become a favorite with this public.

Herr Vogl is far from being a handsome man, but his bearing is manly and dignified. His voice shows some evidence of the wear and tear of long service in the unfavorably-constructed vocal measures of the great German master. Yet it is a good voice, containing many beautiful tones, and of agreeable general quality. The singer uses it with no little judgment, making effective use of its better notes, and declaiming the recitative passages with the customary skill and intelligence of a German. He was beyond a doubt the most vigorous and assertive Lohengrin seen on the local stage since the palmy days of Campanini.

Herr Vogl's début was not made under auspicious circumstances. In addition to his own weakened condition, Fräulein Huhn, who was the Ortrud, had a fainting fit near the end of the first act; in the second act the top of Antwerp minster folded down over the rose window, and was thereafter shaken with inward convulsions by a verdant stage carpenter who did not know enough to let it alone, and throughout the performance the nuisances in the parterre boxes, just below the entrance to the orchestra on the left of the auditorium, talked out loud, with an utter disregard of the commonest courtesy, during the entire performance. It is a pity that Ward McAllister does not teach his friends good manners, if he is acquainted with them himself.

The Elsa of the evening was Fräulein Wiesner, who contrived to sing out of tune most of the time and exhibited an alarming vibrato all the time. Her unhappy habit of endeavoring to produce her upper notes as open tones sometimes leads to her sending out very disagreeable sounds. Fräulein Huhn was the Ortrud, and, under the circumstances her performance cannot be criticized. She was sick, and that was a sufficient excuse.

Herr Reichmann was an excellent Telramund, declaiming his vigorous measures with fine fervor. Herr Beck was the Herald, a rôle in which he is satisfactory, and Herr Behrens was a tolerably good King. The chorus did its share of the evening's work passably. Walter Damrosch conducted and read the vorspiel much too slowly and the introduction to the third act considerably too fast.

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