Slouched glumly in his rehearsal seat, Rudolf Bing blinked at the unscheduled little scene on the Metropolitan Opera stage. An impromptu chorus of stagehands was standing among the singers, bellowing Happy Birthday to You, and looking at him. Bing recalled that it was indeed his birthday, his soth. He rose with a reflex smile. “Thank you, thank you,” he said. “Those,” he added wryly, “were the first words this afternoon that I could understand.”
General Manager Bing had been listening to a rehearsal of the Metropolitan Opera’s third opera in English this season. The first two, Fledermaus and Cosí Fan Tutte, were brilliant hits, in which almost every word came through clearly. But after listening to his singers maim a new translation of Puccini’s one-act comic opera, Gianni Schicchi, Bing was about ready to concede that it might as well be sung in Bantu. In this, as it turned out at the performance the next night, Bing had merely anticipated public opinion.
The singers were in good voice. All of them acted their parts with lively bumptiousness, which was appropriate enough, since Gianni Schicchi is broad farce set to thin musical fare, and it needs all the guffaws it can get. But most of the time, only the strenuous antipasto English of Basso Salvatore Baccaloni in the title role could be clearly understood. The English-speaking singers mumbled through their mother tongue as if their diction could be taken for granted.
And Gianni Schicchi was just half of Bing’s troubles that night. The second short opera on his double bill was Richard Strauss’s lurid Salome, and this time the ear fared better than the eye.
Conductor Fritz Reiner whipped his orchestra through a vivid and powerful performance. Most of the singing was first-rate. But the main event, the sensuous “Dance of the Seven Veils,” by red-haired Ljuba Welitch, was a decided letdown. Back from Vienna for her first appearance this season, Soprano Welitch sang in a voice as electric as ever, but as she stripped herself of her veils, it became amply clear that Viennese cooking has more than agreed with her. The irreverent Daily News found her somewhat grotesque gyrations “hilariously funny . . . She bounces.”
It was enough to make the manager of the Met feel fully 50.
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