Metropolitan Opera Archives

Presentation
Lowell Wadmond, Vice Chairman of the Board
This was Zinka Milanov's farewell performance. The onstage ceremony honoring the soprano preceded Act IV.

Review 1:

Review of Louis Snyder in the New York Herald Tribune

....Zinka Milanov sang her last complete performance at the Broadway house last night. The opera was Giordano's "Andrea Chenier," her role was, of course, the heroine Maddalena, with Richard Tucker in the title role, Anselmo Colzani as Gerard, and Francesco Molinari-Pradelli conducting.

On Saturday night, Mme. Milanov will be joining with her colleagues in their musical farewell to the "old" Met, but last night was her night and an occasion for a bulging houseful of cheering, applauding and weeping admirers to let the illustrious Yugoslavian soprano know what she has meant to them through the past 28 years.

In any season, the departure from the operatic scene of a star of Mme. Milanov's magnitude would be cause for nostalgia and regret, last night, she received a series of show-stopping ovations culminating with a seven-minute outpouring of affection, following her third-act aria, "La mamma morta," which has had few parallels in the history of the house. Despite the obvious emotional demands of the evening, Mme. Milanov performed, as she has always performed here, with the grandeur and authority reserved for the phenomenally gifted few, and it wasn't sentiment alone which told everyone present that they will never hear and see anyone quite like her again.

Before the start of the last act, there were presentations of a silver tray from the Metropolitan Opera Association by Lowell Wadmond, vice-chairman of the Board of Directors, and of a Steuben glass cup from the Met management by general manager Rudolf Bing, "and I have never known you to arrive late or unprepared, which shows your great sense of responsibility to your art, your public and to yourself."

Mme. Milanov replied briefly, with the first show of personal emotion of the evening. "I just want to say good bye," she said. "I love you all with all my heart, and I will carry you with me as long as I live."

Photograph of Zinka Milanov at her farewell performance by Louis Mélançon.

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