[Met Performance] CID:112810



Siegfried
Metropolitan Opera House, Fri, January 20, 1933




Siegfried (160)
Richard Wagner | Richard Wagner
Siegfried
Lauritz Melchior

Brünnhilde
Frida Leider

Wanderer
Friedrich Schorr

Erda
Maria Olszewska

Mime
Marek Windheim

Alberich
Gustav Schützendorf

Fafner
Siegfried Tappolet

Forest Bird
Editha Fleischer


Conductor
Artur Bodanzky







Review 1:

Review of Lawrence Gilman in the New York Herald Tribune

Notable New Singers In the Season's First 'Siegfried' at the Metropolitan

Last evening's audience at the Metropolitan had the inestimable privilege of hearing "Siegfried" performed by a cast of principals which was perhaps as nearly ideal as one could ask in this none too obviously flawless world. It is true that "Siegfried," in comparison with others of Wagner's greater works, has been generally well served in recent years at the Metropolitan. We have had Melchior for the name-part, Kappel as the Brünnhilde, Schorr as the Wanderer, Branzell as Erda; and. in addition, we have had as conductor Mr. Bodanzky, whose interpretation of Wagner's music has grown astonishingly of late in its measure of kindling rapport and its power of communicative eloquence. The cooperation of these artists has given us, upon occasion, some performances of "Siegfried" which none of us is likely to forget.

Yet the admirable quartet of singing-actors whom I have just named left something to be desired. Mme. Kappel's "Siegfried" Brünnhilde has always been a sincere, an impassioned, and an affecting one; but it has had a slightly homespun quality, a touch of plebeian, which was undeniably out of character. It is true that Wotan had doomed his refractory daughter to be a spinner; but there is nothing to show that Brünnhilde ever made even a pair of socks for Siegfried. When I first heard Mme. Kappel's Brünnhilde seven years ago in Munich, I said that it reminded one less of a fallen goddess than of some heroic and fiery young peasant. And in that respect it has not changed, admirable and moving though it is.

The Brünnhilde of the Metropolitan's new dramatic soprano, Frida Leider, which was heard last evening for the first time in New York, is an impersonation that has long been famous abroad. Its renown is justified. This is a creation in the grand manner. Mme. Leider's Brünnhilde has the air and carriage of the woman who was a goddess. She reflects for us something of those clouds of glory that burnish. Wagner's music; and when, at her awakening, she lifted her arms in gestures of sovereign grace and hieratic solemnity, greeting the sun, the light, the day, in that tonal apostrophe whose sublimity stops the breath, one was ready to believe that those trailing clouds of glory had rested once, upon Valhalla.

The mighty winds of this score, which come to us, in its final act, from Walkürean fields of sleep, those echoes from the mountains of the gods which sound through this epic in tones, set a formidable imaginative pattern for the lyric histrion. And it would not be exact to say that Mme, Leider is fully equipped today, either in voice or in dramatic power, to give us a supremely great Brünnhilde. Supremely great Brünnhildes are still, alas, of the past - the achievements of two or three unforgettable artists of transcendent gifts.

Mme. Leider does not command the pealing splendor of tone in the higher range that is demanded by this ruthless score in certain climactic passage - in, for example, that gigantic fugat with which Wagner, the exuberant Titan, chose to prepare the culmination of his love duo, with its cruel tessitura; nor is she equal to the rapturous C of the close. This Brünnhilde achieves its exaltation of stature and of mood through other means - through its regal distinction of style, its Olympian dignity and poise, its noble felicity of movement and posture. Above all, by the musical beauty of her singing and the finesse and aristocracy of her style.

It is many years since the "Siegfried" Brünnhilde has been sung with the loveliness and the mastery which were bestowed on it last night. Some may perhaps have wished that this Brünnhilde had, at the close, given herself to her lover with a more ecstatic abandonment. That "passionate embrace" which Wagner asks, that woman "laughing wildly in her joy," were restrained last night by somewhat too imperial a poise. It would do this Brünnhilde no harm to remember that she is no longer, after all, a goddess. Yet the beauty and sweep and dignity of the performance were more than compensatory.

As for the Metropolitan's illustrious new contralto, Mme. Olszewska, the Erda of the cast, the magnificence of her performance sent the memories of the cognoscenti back to the Golden Age for adequate comparisons. We have heard here no finer Erda since the prime of Schumann-Heink. Last night's remarkable cast will be heard again in the cyclic performance of "Siegfried" on Thursday afternoon, February 9, and it will then be possible to write of it in more detail. The Siegfried of Mr. Melchior, the Wanderer, or Mr. Schorr, are old and greatly valued friends. They, with the others of the cast, fulfilled a performance of the colossal work which left us at the end, as "Siegfried" always does, breathless and silent in the presence of its superhuman genius.

"Yes, I can still compose!" remarked the fifty-six-year-old Wagner to Cosima he played to her, at Tribschen, the completed pages of the final scene of "Siegfried." those pages which are unmatched in music for prodigal gloriousness of beauty - which, for the first time, make radiance an experience of the ear.



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