Music: Goulash Without Paprika

The Metropolitan Opera likes to keep one or two operettas in its repertory, if only for purposes of New Year’s Eve entertainment. In the past, Manager Rudolf Bing has done well with Strauss’s Die Fledermaus and Offenbach’s La Péri-chole. Last week the Met unveiled a dazzling production of another Strauss operetta, The Gypsy Baron. While it might please properly champagned New Year’s Eve audiences, the Met’s Gypsy is more than half a failure for ordinary, year-round consumption.

On the credit side, and almost worth the price of admission, is Johann Strauss’s delightful score, notably the famed Treasure Waltz, a melting Act II love duet, and plenty of Hungarian themes, both martial and melancholy. Another plus: Designer Rolf Gérard’s brilliant costumes and sets, particularly a Viennese throne room almost handsome enough to bring back the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Heavily on the minus side are a preposterous libretto, not aided by Translator Maurice Valency’s English lyrics, and Cyril Ritchard’s uncertain direction.

The story—involving an exiled Hungarian nobleman returning to claim his father’s estate, a beautiful gypsy maid who is really a princess, a treasure buried on the land of a rich and comic pig farmer —is a typical operetta mixture of farce and romance. Unfortunately, Director Ritchard and his cast could not quite make up their minds whether they were working for laughs or for sentiment. And for reasons best known to himself, Translator Valency had his Hungarians rising in a patriotic revolt against Austrian oppression (the 74-year-old original involved merely a musical-comedy war against Spain).

In the pit, Conductor Erich Leinsdorf, a Mozart specialist, led the orchestra correctly, but without paprika. Apart from Mezzo Regina Resnik, fine as an old fortuneteller, the only really convincing member of the cast was Walter Slezak, making his Met debut as the pig farmer, Szupán. The son of famed Tenor Leo Slezak, 57-year-old Actor Slezak had wanted to stand on the stage of the Met for as long as he could remember, was delighted when he got his father’s old dressing room.

Though without much voice—he classifies himself as a “bastard bari-tenor”—Actor Slezak made the audience laugh almost every time he opened his mouth, particularly at his first-act entrance, when he was bundled in fluttery finery and carried a small live pig (rubber diapered) under his arm. Whatever critics thought of the rest of the performance, no one had an unkind word for Walter. Said he: “Maybe the Met should apologize to me for the mixed reviews; I came out shining like a rose.”