[Met Performance] CID:99220



Mignon
Metropolitan Opera House, Mon, April 9, 1928

Debut : Mildred Schneider




Mignon (42)
Ambroise Thomas | Jules Barbier/Michel Carré
Mignon
Lucrezia Bori

Wilhelm Meister
Beniamino Gigli

Philine
Marion Talley

Lothario
Léon Rothier

Frédéric
Ellen Dalossy

Laërte
Angelo Badà

Jarno
Paolo Ananian

Antonio
Louis D'Angelo

Dance
Mildred Schneider [Debut]


Conductor
Louis Hasselmans







Review 1:

Review of Samuel Chotzinoff in the New York World

'MIGNON'

"Mignon," that candid morsel of Wilhelm Meister which Ambroise Thomas Cinderellaized, so to speak, in deference, probably to the French taste of that period for happy operatic endings, started the Metropolitan on the final week of the present season last night.

Opera must be taken for what it is, since disillusionment lurks immediately behind a closer scrutiny. Forgetting Goethe entirely, "Mignon" is a charming example of opera comique packed with easily retained melodies sometimes rising to genuine, though not profound, expressiveness and achieving a plot naïve enough to have been the prototype of all succeeding musical comedies.

The curious among critics might even see in the character of the waif Mignon, the grandmother of Mélisande, for Ambroise Thomas' girl is as vague about her antecedents as the careless heroine of Maeterlinck's tragedy. True, Mignon is chaperoned by a sentimental old harpie, while Mélisande, like Topey, just growed. But all that Mignon can remember of her early life is that she lived in a place where lemons grew, an indication quite on a par with any information Mélisande could have dispensed about herself.

Yet Mignon, in the person of Lucrezia Bori, is a poetic reality, and her final union with Mr. Gigli, the florid but beautifully sounding Wilhelm Meister, cannot but meet with the approval of even a critic nurtured on realism. Miss Talley, too, is pretty happily cast as the peripatetic Bernhardt of the lyric comedy and affects her seemingly carefree polonaise with the ease that comes of laborious preliminary vocalization. This "Mignon" is, taken by and large, one of Mr. Gatti's most entertaining spectacles and one that ought to be as fixed in the Metropolitan's repertoire as "La Gioconda."



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