Metropolitan Opera Archives

When Massenet's "Manon" was given for the third time this season, Victoria de los Angeles made her first Metropolitan appearance as Manon, in a cast and production otherwise unchanged from the two earlier representations. In both singing and characterization Miss De los Angeles' Manon was her finest accomplishment here-unless her Butterfly, which I did not see last spring, is better. Until now, the special acoustical problems of the Metropolitan Opera House had seemed to bother her from time to time. On this occasion, however, there was none of the tentativeness, even the outright miscalculation of volume, that had marred her success in other roles.

From the start Miss De los Angeles sang freely, spontaneously, with an even scale from bottom to top and with high notes (including a scintillant D flat in the ensemble in the gambling scene) that were uniformly brilliant and easy. Her French diction, along with Martial Singher's, was one of the few idiomatic features of the production. In the first scene her acting was a trifle gauche and overdone, as though she found it difficult to persuade herself that she was sixteen. (I have often noticed that really young artists are frequently self-conscious in parts that require them to be younger than they actually are.)

As the drama progressed, however, Miss De los Angeles was increasingly swept up in it and from the Saint Sulpice scene to the end her vocal coloration and her action were suffused with great pathos. Her telling delivery of her share of the Saint Sulpice duet gave the episode a musical and theatrical stature it has not often had hereabouts in recent years. More striking, perhaps, because her earlier performances had given less hint of this potentiality, was the exciting flair with which she delivered both "Je marche sur tons les chemins," in the Cours la Reine scene, and the "Gavotte," here placed in the Hotel Transylvania scene.

Giuseppe Di Stefano's Des Grieux provided many moments of tonal beauty, but he continued to show few signs of any effort to find out what the role is about either musically or stylistically. Mr. Singher was in good form as Lescaut, but the casting of Jerome Hines as the elder Des Grieux remained one of the management's most inscrutable decisions. Fausto Cleva's conducting was again one of his less distinguished demonstrations and the staging and investiture of the whole opera were as sorry as ever.

Photograph of Victoria de los Angeles as the title role in Massenet's Manon by Sedge LeBlang.

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