[Met Performance] CID:152070



Tristan und Isolde
Metropolitan Opera House, Thu, December 1, 1949

Debut : Jonel Perlea




Tristan und Isolde (338)
Richard Wagner | Richard Wagner
Tristan
Lauritz Melchior

Isolde
Helen Traubel

Kurwenal
Herbert Janssen

Brangäne
Blanche Thebom

King Marke
Mihály Székely

Melot
Emery Darcy

Sailor's Voice
Leslie Chabay

Shepherd
Peter Klein

Steersman
Denis Harbour


Conductor
Jonel Perlea [Debut]


Director
Dino Yannopoulos

Set Designer
Joseph Urban

Costume Designer
Mathilde Castel-Bert





Tristan und Isolde received four performances this season.
Traubel's costumes were designed by Adrian.

Review 1:

Jerome D. Bohm in the Herald Tribune

An Impressive “Tristan”

 

The season's first presentation of Wagner's "Tristan and Isolde" was in every way a highly impressive one. There was a new conductor, the Romanian Jonal Perlea, and the principals in the cast were all well known in their roles, so his accomplishments will be dealt with first, for he is indubitably a musician of the utmost distinction.

No more formidable task could be given to a conductor for his first assignment than this music-drama which demands complete mastery of his art in both its technical and interpretative aspects. Mr. Perlea met these requirements unswervingly. He has the poetic insight, the incandescent temperament, and the aural sensibility essential for a telling discourse of this incomparable work.

Every facet of the score was perceptively realized, its intimate as well as its most impassioned pages. The conception was a flawlessly proportioned one. There were not, as is so often the case, a dozen climaxes in the second act, but a gradually increasing intensity which appositely reached its peak in the duct between Tristan and Isolde  just before the entrance of King Marke. And at all times the volume of sound, in the most ecstatic as well as in the softest passages, was so carefully adjusted that the singers could be heard above the orchestra. The texture of the ceaselessly changing web of sound was of unfailing sensuousness.  I have seldom left a "Tristan" performance so regretfully after the second act.

With so inspiring a conductor to guide them, it was small wonder that the vocalists tarried on such consistently lofty altitudes of achievement, admitted that the leading members of the cast were in their best form.

Never in the many times I have heard Miss Traubel's Isolde has it been imbued with such a winning amalgam of tenderness and passion. That she was unable to reach the two high Bs in her first-act narrative was easy to forgive, for her singing otherwise was of truly extraordinary tonal loveliness and deeply affecting expressivity. Every word of the text was meaningfully colored.

What was even more astonishing was the tonal beauty of Mr. Melchior's Tristan. This has always been his finest portrayal, yet in the innumerable times he has offered it, here and abroad, it may be doubted that he has ever delivered the music of the second act, especially his part of "O sink hernieder," with such vocal perfection or with such clear and warm tonal investiture of pianissimo phrases.

As Brangäne, Miss Thebom, too, sang compellingly — with dramatic cogency where necessary and with luminous, admirably controlled sounds in the "Warning Call From the Tower" in the second act. Mr. Janssen's Kurvenal was resonantly voiced in the first act and the King Marke of Mr. Szekely was tonally rich, if not as poignantly expressive as it might have been.



Search by season: 1949-50

Search by title: Tristan und Isolde,



Met careers