[Met Performance] CID:143400



La Traviata
Metropolitan Opera House, Sat, December 21, 1946 Matinee Broadcast





La Traviata (287)
Giuseppe Verdi | Francesco Maria Piave
Violetta
Licia Albanese

Alfredo
Jan Peerce

Germont
Leonard Warren

Flora
Thelma Votipka

Gastone
Leslie Chabay

Baron Douphol
George Cehanovsky

Marquis D'Obigny
John Baker

Dr. Grenvil
Lorenzo Alvary

Annina
Thelma Altman

Dance
Peggy Smithers

Dance
Marina Svetlova


Conductor
Cesare Sodero







Review 1:

Review of Virgil Thomson in the Herald Tribune

Christmas Gift

No prettier season present could have been offered the fifteen million persons who listen every Saturday afternoon to the broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera than yesterday's performance of Verdi's immortal "Traviata." The cast was perfect, the direction animated, the singing without flaw. Everybody was at ease, in voice, of good spirits. And if the reading as a whole was less streamlined (and less rapid) than the recent Toscanini broadcasts of the same work, which were pure Heaven, it is well to remember that yesterday's was a real theater performance as well as a broadcast. And real theater does not admit the speeds that studio broadcasts, intended only for listening, do. The Maestro himself, had stage action been present, might well have lingered longer over some of the more touching passages.

Licia Albanese's Violetta is the finest rendering of the role now available to my knowledge in the United States. Jan Peerce's Alfredo and Leonard Warren's Germont have dignity and every vocal distinction, including that of beauty. When you add to these admirable artists Thelma Votipka as Flora, you have a quartet of voices all of the greatest loveliness, a wealth of natural beauty in schooled hands such as the Metropolitan is rarely able to offer in one performance if casts like that were available more regularly. I am sure I should receive fewer letters from opera lovers urging me to "sock the Met."

Well, on this occasion, let us forget off nights and be thankful for yesterday's Christmas goodies, which included bright, clean choral work, shipshape costumes and scenery and a general high-class-ness of presentation that backed up handsomely the star singing of the four principals. Let us be thankful, too, for the work itself, the sweetest and grandest apotheosis of the waltz ever composed by the hand of man.

Not Schubert or Chopin or Ravel or Lanner or Offenbach or anybody named Strauss (including Richard) ever wrote a waltz of such generous dimensions and such hugely varied expressivity as Verdi gave the world in "La Traviata." It runs three hours, with intermissions, and covers a gamut of feeling from that of budding love at a party(against the clatter of refreshments) to death from pulmonary tuberculosis.

The work has gayety, abundance, style, simplicity, grace and a deep sincerity. The original play, Dumas's "La Dame aux Camélias," is largely hokum. Verdi's opera is not hokum at all. It is pure and tender and humane and perfectly real. Its performance by so nearly ideal a cast as yesterday's is a pleasure long to be cherished in memory.



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