Metropolitan Opera Archives

The gods went up in smoke and the accursed ring went back to the safe deposit yesterday afternoon in one of the noisiest performances of "Götterdämmerung" that ever disturbed the peace of Bayreuth-on-the-Subway. Mr. Bodanzky, who fourteen years ago came in like a lamb, seems determined to go out like a lion,. Even the estimable Alfred Hertz in his wildest paroxysms of dynamic fury never outdid this exhibition. Small wonder if some of the orchestral playing sounded mutinous. And, believe it or not, Mr. Bodanzky was once upon a time supposed to have made Wagner safe for gentility and singers!

On the farther side of the footlights the day's doings ranged from middling to bad. Some of the stage management would have shamed a troupe of provincial barnstormers. With a single exception the cast was the one which appears to have become standardized for the current purposes of Metropolitan "Götterdämmerungs." That exception was Lauritz Melchior, who placed on view yesterday a Siegfried whose lavish bulk affirmed his prosperous maturity, if not his heroism. Although the tenor's singing was, in some respects, rather better than a fortnight ago in "Die Walküre." His upper tones were once more hard as flint and invariably emitted with a rigid suppression of all nasal resonance.

Dramatically Mr. Melchior drew now and then on his Bayreuth experience and presented not a more colorable, but at least a somewhat more enlivening Volsung than has lately been the rule here. He climbed Brünnhilde's fire-girt rock reasonably disguised and colored his voice as the directions prescribe. But Siegfrieds at the Festspielhaus do not stand up and carry on unsupported by helping hands after receiving the death thrust, as Mr. Melchior did yesterday without visible compunction.

Mme. Kappel, singing badly, demonstrated again that she and the avenging Brünnhilde were never made for each other. Mme. Müller was a skittish Gutrune and Mme. Branzell a dull, inexpressive Waltraute. Mr. Schorr's Gunther resembled the incomparable one of Bayreuth's Josef Correck in its state of beardlessness, but not otherwise. Mr. Bohnen's Hagen was, as usual, everything that Wagner's Hagen is not.

Search by season: 1928-29

Search by title: Götterdämmerung, Ring Cycle [50],

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