[Met Performance] CID:38000

Opening Night {22}, General Manager (Director): Heinrich Conried

Roméo et Juliette
Metropolitan Opera House, Mon, November 26, 1906

Debut : Charles Rousselière, Geraldine Farrar, Jules-Charles Simard




Roméo et Juliette (102)
Charles Gounod | Jules Barbier/Michel Carré
Roméo
Charles Rousselière [Debut]

Juliette
Geraldine Farrar [Debut]

Frère Laurent
Pol Plançon

Stéphano
Josephine Jacoby

Mercutio
Jules-Charles Simard [Debut]

Gertrude
Georgine Von Januschowsky

Capulet
Marcel Journet

Tybalt
Jacques Bars

Grégorio
Bernard Bégué

Duke of Verona
Adolph Mühlmann


Conductor
Samuel Bovy


Director
Eugène Dufriche





Roméo et Juliette received six performances this season.

Review 1:

Review of Richard Aldrich in The New York Times

Miss Farrar comes back to her native land as one of the American singers who have made name and fame for themselves abroad. It is not always easy to establish the same success in this country, and it may be that all she does will not meet with quite so unqualified acceptance as it has abroad. But she went far upon that road in what she accomplished last evening. She made a most agreeable impression in her impersonation of Juliette; for she is full of excellent instincts making for the best things as a lyric actress. She has a charming personality, a graceful and winning one, and her stage presence is alluring and with much of the girlishness of Juliette.

It has been said that by the time an actress has learned the art of denoting the passion and the ecstatic emotion of Juliette she could rarely still be in possession of the juvenile charm that the part needs. But Miss Farrar has it, and has at the same time skill and resource in stage craft. She is a singer of remarkable gifts. Her voice is a full and rich soprano, lyric in its nature and flexibility, yet rather darkly colored and with not a little of the dramatic quality and with a power of dramatic nuance that she uses in the main skillfully. Her singing is generally free and spontaneous in delivery, well phrased and well enunciated, yet she is not a wholly finished vocalist, and there were matters in her singing that could net meet with entire approbation, as in the duet in the fourth act, where she sang with a certain constraint.

There will be more interesting and more important music of the exhibition of her artistic powers before the season is much further advanced, but here was ample cause in her Juliette of last evening for the high expectations that have been raised for her in the musical public of New York.

From the

Review 2:

Review of Henry Krehbiel in the New York Tribune

Miss Farrar was most graciously received, and was then permitted with kind encouragement to win her way to popular approval. She won that approval, and she won more: she achieved her place among those whom a Metropolitan audience recognizes as in the foremost of the world's operatic artists. She appeared as a beautiful version; youthful, charming in face, figure, movement and attitude. She sang with a voice of exquisite quality in the middle register, and one that was vibrant with feeling almost always. She acted like one whose instincts for the stage were full and eager, but also like one who, not needing to learn what to do, had neglected to learn that it is possible to do too much. Had she been one-half less consciously demonstrative, whenever she stepped out of the dramatic picture, one-half less sweeping in her movements and gestures when she was in the picture, she would have been twice as admirable to her compatriots who were rejoicing in her success, and twice as convincing to those who were sitting in judgment upon an artist for whom the trumps of acclaim have been so loudly sounded that their din will make calm listening difficult for some time to come. But she has won a welcome that must have emphatic expression. The few crudities in her vocalization are pushed into notice by the very excellence of her merits. Red and warm blood flows in her voice and pulses in harmony with the emotions of the play. She is eloquently truthful in declamation, and correct taste dictates her choice of nuance and vocal color. It is only when she forces her upper tones that sensuous charm leaves her voice in a measure and one deplores the departure all the more because the voice is of a carrying power that makes strenuousness unnecessary.



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