Music: Flagstad’s Week

When the curtain rises on Wagner’s Götterdämmerung (Dusk of the Gods), three Norns are spinning the dark threads of Wotan’s fate. During the next four and a half hours Siegfried is speared in the back, his half-divine wife follows him onto the pyre and all Valhalla collapses in flames. Because Götterdämmerung is the longest and most difficult opera in Wagner’s Ring, it is sung more rarely than the others. People squeezed into every available inch of standing room one afternoon last week when Manhattan’s Metropolitan Opera gave Götterdämmerung the first of its two performances this season.*

The Brünnhilde in Götterdämmerung is the hardest role in all grand opera. She suffers such violent emotions, has to sing such grueling high passages, that few singers have ever made her sound convincing. Wagner used to pace the floor in anguish while writing Brünnhilde’s songs. Time and again he asked himself whether any woman alive would be equal to them. Last week’s audience again marveled at Kirsten Flagstad’s command of the role, the way she used her strong, rich voice to convey Brünnhilde’s unutterable happiness with Siegfried, her rage at being betrayed, the grimness with which she sought his death.

After such a taxing role as this any soprano has earned a rest. But next evening Flagstad went on again, as Elsa in Lohengrin, showing no trace of fatigue. The day after that, she became Isolde and sang her third major role in three days so freshly, so composedly that one would have thought it was her first.

Easily the greatest Wagnerian soprano alive, Kirsten Flagstad is a simple, 40-year-old matron who knits placidly between scenes, eats one hearty meal a day, allows herself half a bottle of champagne after what she considers a good performance. Flagstad’s heavy schedule leaves her little time for play. Gone are the days when she could go skiing in her native Norway, and, though she takes good care of herself, she is losing the figure that once made her look like a Valkyrie as well as sing like one. She spends what spare time she has playing twelve kinds of solitaire in her Manhattan hotel apartment, window-shopping with her 19-year-old stepdaughter Anna, who is studying interior decoration. Flagstad’s husband, a wealthy Norse lumberman named Henry Johansen, joined them in Manhattan last month.

Though Flagstad is the Metropolitan’s prime drawing card, its German wing— with Rethberg, Lehmann, Melchior, Schorr, List—was the world’s finest even before her arrival. When Edward Johnson became general manager, he knew better than to tamper with the wing that artistically and box-officially is his best. The Italian and French wings were in less happy state, and Johnson combed Europe last summer engaging fresh singers.

One newcomer was Gina Cigna, who has been singing roles at La Scala since Toscanini recommended her there six years ago. The late great Respighi chose her to take the lead in his La Fiamma. Mme Cigna made her Metropolitan debut last month as Aïda. Her singing was so warm and rich, her dramatic sense so keen, that the audience called her before the curtain time after time. Later she sang Ponchielli’s La Gioconda, Bellini’s Norma, Leonora in Verdi’s Il Trovatore. Though Cigna has a frail lower voice and occasionally forces notes, she sang these ornate roles with brilliance and spirit. Johnson wanted to extend her term so she could be Donna Anna in a revival of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. La Scala, where she was scheduled to sing this month, would not release her.

The Metropolitan’s most decorative recruit in years is Bidú Sayáo, slim, slick and 30, who turned up in Manhattan last spring to solo with the Philharmonic-Symphony and was quickly snapped up by the opera. Her debut as Manon was a triumph of personality as well as art. The little Brazilian used her little voice so that every phrase told. She tossed her pretty head, fell in and out of love, made Massenet’s shallow, adorable wanton come to life. In La Traviata she was a higher-minded harlot, pathetically resigning her love so as not to ruin him. She sang the difficult display-piece Sempre Libera with uncommon charm.

Other new singers were less impressive. Vina Bovy sang carelessly, seldom felt any obligation to act (TIME, Jan. 18). When Gertrud Ruenger, originally a contralto at the Vienna Staatsoper, took the soprano role of Brünnhilde, she sounded shrill and lifeless. John Brownlee, a young Australian baritone, made an indifferent Rigoletto. But Kerstin Thorborg raised the recruits’ average with a splendid Fricka.

Manager Johnson’s second season has abounded in revivals and premieres. Wagner’s Flying Dutchman was put on for the first time in five years, and Flagstad and Baritone Friedrich Schorr made it unforgettable. In a revival of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Coq d’Or, Lily Pons danced as well as sang the role of the unearthly siren who lured fat, fantastic King Dodon to his doom. Coq d’Or was successful enough to be repeated four times. Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffman was almost as popular in spite of over-ingenious mounting by Stage Director Herbert Graf.

At its U. S. premiere, Richard Hagman’s Caponsacchi made few friends. His scoring for orchestra was exasperatingly derivative. The arias were few and far between, singers rarely being assigned more than four or five consecutive lines. Cimarosa’s 145-year-old opéra bouffe, The Secret Marriage, had its Metropolitan premiere. It proved to be tenuous but gay, would have been gayer had singers not treated it like a period piece.

Last week some patrons were complaining that the Metropolitan had not yet put on a single opera of Puccini, was not going to put on any Strauss. Others felt that Johnson had done as much as could be expected in his second year. Box-office returns were better than in any year since the Depression. The opera company was planning its most extended tour in years. Next season would almost certainly be stretched from 14 weeks to 16. Flagstad, Thorborg, Cigna, Melchior and Martinelli had all been asked to sing in London at the Coronation operaseason. Directors expressed their approval by giving Johnson a two-year contract. The conviction grew that next year Manager Johnson would have a freer hand and a good chance of making the Metropolitan in all departments as brilliant as it used to be under old Gatti-Casazza.

*Last week’s Götterdämmerung wound up the Metropolitan’s 1937 Ring cycle. The Ring is being repeated in an evening series, as it was last year. Next Götterdämmerung,: March 20.