[Met Performance] CID:110710



Siegfried
Ring Cycle [53] Uncut
Metropolitan Opera House, Fri, March 11, 1932 Matinee Broadcast





Siegfried (157)
Richard Wagner | Richard Wagner
Siegfried
Lauritz Melchior

Brünnhilde
Göta Ljungberg

Wanderer
Michael Bohnen

Erda
Ernestine Schumann-Heink [Last performance]

Mime
Hans Clemens

Alberich
Gustav Schützendorf

Fafner
Siegfried Tappolet

Forest Bird
Editha Fleischer


Conductor
Artur Bodanzky


Ring Cycle [53] Uncut






Act II of Siegfried was broadcast from 3-4 pm on March 11, 1932

Review 1:

Review by Olin Downes of the New York Times:

The crowning scene of the opera is not the final scene, where the lovers, aroused to their happy lot, bawl their glee to the heavens, but the first scene of the last act-the last meeting of Wotan and Erda; the fateful words that pronounce the end; the coming of Siegfried, and the shattering of Wotan's spear....

The effect of the incommensurable passage of yesterday was due above all to Mme. Schumann-Heink's strange and mystical delivery of the prophecy of Erda. Her opening lines were those of a great artist gaining control of her resources. Thereafter, music and text were projected with an eloquence that took the breath away. The characteristic difference between the middle and upper registers of the voice, demanding special consideration in its employment, was utilized with inspired mastery to achieve effects of peculiar eeriness. And at this moment all elements in the performance fused. Mr. Bodanzky's orchestra taking an unearthly pallor, suddenly replacing the tumultuous splendor of the music of the god and the mountaintop with the one possible tonal background. Because of these things, no other artist in the cast, through the afternoon, so held and captured the imagination of the audience as did Mme. Schumann-Heink - an effect achieved by knowledge and imagination embodied in the tone and in every syllable of the text she delivered so memorably.



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