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[Met Performance] CID:28510

Metropolitan Opera Premiere, New Production

La Fille du Régiment
Cavalleria Rusticana
Metropolitan Opera House, Mon, January 6, 1902



Gaetano Donizetti



La Fille du Régiment received five performances this season.
Alternate titles: The Daughter of the Regiment; La Figlia del Reggimento.

Review 1:

Review of W. J. Henderson in The New York Times:

The pretty little opera was certainly new to most of last night's audience. It was received with evidences of the greatest pleasure though it naturally suffered from the loss of much of its effect in the vast spaces of the Metropolitan auditorium. Like all these comic operas, in which the music is built on slight patterns, the action, facial expression and byplay count for so much. "La Fille du Regiment" should be performed in a small theatre, where the audience and the actors could be close enough together for the stretching of the invisible cord of magnetism between them....

No words except as the reader might take for hyperbole of the most extravagant kind could justly describe the brilliancy of the performance which Mme. Sembrich gave last night.... Her every action seems to be spontaneous. Her face is a book. Her gestures are eloquent. And she fills her vocal work with a subtle and infectious humor, when that is called for, and with gentle and touching sentiment when that is required. The climax of her performance was reached in the rehearsal of the song in the second act. Wherein her action, her delightfully humorous and vocally wonderful burlesque of the music, together with her cadenza as she tore up the despised piece of music, carried the audience quite away. It is many a day since such a burst of enthusiasm as followed this has been heard in the Metropolitan Opera House. The audience seemed to realize then that it was present at a marvelously fine performance by the only living woman who could have given it. Whence is her successor to come? Alas! That is the question no one can answer.

Review 2:

Review of Henry Krehbiel in the New York Tribune:

The revival of "La File du Regiment" emphasizes a need that often forces itself upon the attention of lovers of the opera in New York-that of a small lyric theatre in which operas of the lighter kind can be heard and seen as they ought... in order to be appreciated. The city needs an Opera Comique as well as the Grand Opera. It is not desirable that interest in lyric comedy shall die; nor is it likely. The strenuous commercial and social life of today demands relaxation more than instruction. Serious music, instrumental and vocal, is tending more and more toward the discussion of psychological and pathological problems. The tendency cannot be checked nor need it be. In the course of time it will discover that idealism for which it is groping through dark and materialistic mazes; but meanwhile music is likely ever and anon to revert to old forms of expression because of the intimate love for sensuous beauty. ...The present generation is not likely to call out for a return to the tragic music of the masters of three quarters of a century more or less ago, but it will not lose the capacity to enjoy "Le Nozze di Figaro," "Il Barbiere di Siviglia," "Don Pasquale," "L'Elisir d'Amore," and "La Fille du Regiment" if it is privileged to hear it under proper conditions. To create and nourish such conditions New York needs an adjunct to the Metropolitan Opera.

Search by season: 1901-02

Search by title: La Fille du Régiment, Cavalleria Rusticana,



Met careers

• Philippe Flon [Conductor]
• Marcella Sembrich [Marie]
• Thomas Salignac [Tonio]
• Marie Van Cauteren [Marquise of Berkenfield]
• Charles Gilibert [Sergeant Sulpice]
• Eugène Dufriche [Hortentius]
• Lodovico Viviani [Corporal]
• Emma Calvé [Santuzza]
• Andreas Dippel [Turiddu]
• Louise Homer [Lola]
• Giuseppe Campanari [Alfio]
• Mathilde Bauermeister [Mamma Lucia]
• Gaetano Donizetti [Composer]