Metropolitan Opera Archives

The repetition of Wagner's "Walküre" at the Metropolitan Opera House last night brought with it three important changes of cast. Ella Flesch was heard for the first time here as Sieglinde, Jeanne Palmer appeared for the first time as Brünnhilde and Emery Darcy offered his first complete assumption of the role of Siegmund having once, two season ago, been heard in a performance of the first act of this music drama on a Sunday evening.

Miss Flesch's Sieglinde proved a worth-while delineation in many ways. Her first act was tentatively begun and her lower tones sometime wanted in body because insufficiently focused. But as the act got under way, Miss Flesch's singing gained in solidity and her delivery of her portion of the love-duet, including "Du bist der Lenz," was tellingly expressive.

Some of her best work from the purely tonal aspect was vouchsafed in the dramatic utterances in the second act of the fear-crazed half-hysterical fugitive. A slenderer Sieglinde than any other of recent seasons, Miss Flesch's acting revealed uncommon perception for the tender, womanly and ardent facets of the part, being gracefully plastic in the impassioned moments of the first and second acts.

As Brünnhilde, Miss Palmer, too, did some commendable things, notably in restoring to its original tonality the "Ho-yo-to-ho." One doubts, however, that Miss Palmer's voice, for all the fullness of its upper register, is a true dramatic soprano. For it wants in the gleaming brilliancy demanded for a convincing disclosure of this music. The possessor of a warm, soft-textured voice, Miss Palmer's failure to point or support her tones sufficiently accounted for her inability to vitalize her music, whether high , as in the "Ho-yo-to-ho," or low, as in the "Todesverkündigung." Her portrayal was a sympathetic one, histrionically viewed.

Mr. Darcy's Siegmund, if not quite so satisfactory as his fine Parsifal of last season, had many persuasive qualities. His dark, appealing voice has not the ringing resonance at the top to lend the essential impact to Siegmund's more heroic utterances. But the more lyrical, poetic pages of his music he sang with winning warmth.

He has not yet associated himself completely with the role from the dramatic point of view: greater cogency could be brought thereto at once by a less consistently slouchy posture. The remaining roles were in familiar hands and Mr. Breisach conducted competently, if without much intensity.

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