Thursday, March 16, 2017

My First Opera Performances

Attending Operas When in High School

 I don’t remember all the operas I attended at the old (38th Street) Met while I was in high school (that is before my stint in the Navy), but I remember clearly seeing Wagner’s Ring des Nibelungen in 1942 or 1943 and that I also saw the Zauberflöte as early as that. The Ring, about which I remember much more, had a cast of Lauritz Melchior (Siegmund and Siegfried) and Helen Traubel as Brünhilde. It also had Lotte Lehmann in her very last (or, possibly, next to last) Sieglinde.
   My seat was in the next to last row of the Family Circle, what seemed like a block away from the stage. Because I had also taken out the (miniature) scores of the operas, my attention to the stage was only intermittent. No great loss, as I recall, since the visual aspect of the performances—acting, sets, lighting—was pretty mundane. Not so the music! Still, I recall that I was indignant because only four harps—rather than the six I found in the score—portrayed the Rhine in Das Rheingold. (Remember that I was 15 or 16 years old at the time.)
   I actually saw my first opera in Heidelberg, age ten or so; it was Der Freischütz. (My mother, who was emphatically not a fan of opera, called it Der Schreifritz, The Screaming Fritz.) I was taken there by my piano teacher, who also took me to Edwin Fischer conducting a chamber orchestra and playing a Mozart piano concerto. These were my first experiences of professional performances.
   To come back to the Met, I saw several other operas while in high school, most notably Die Zauberflöte with Charles Kullman as Tamino (the only cast member whose name I remember). I single out the Magic Flute because it became a particular favorite of mine, in part because of the Beecham performance on the very first records I bought—two volumes of 78 rpms.
  I won’t go on with a recitation of operas I have seen, but I do want to make one point. Now and then people ask me whether I’m an opera fan, a question to which I can’t give a straight answer. What I tend to say is that I’m really a (classical) music lover. I like good voices well enough, but I don’t go after them, unless they are singing what I want to hear. Maybe more significant is the fact that Mozart and Wagner are at the top of my list—but also Alban Berg, among other composers, from Gluck to Schoenberg. But I pay very little attention to the likes of Bellini and Donizetti. I once sat through an opera by the latter (I don’t remember which) and was annoyed because I couldn’t stop myself from counting seemingly endless phrases of eight bars each.

   And I do have a candidate of what I think is the most perfect opera—the music, of course, but also all aspects of the libretto: the characters, the varied bunch of them, the plot, and the witty text:  Le Nozze di Figaro—which in English would be more correctly known as Figaro’s Wedding.  I’ve never heard the passage in which the Count asks the Countess to forgive him (Contessa perdono!)—just before the brief, cheerful finale—without getting tears in my eyes.

1 comment:

  1. Your narration really touched me! I also remember the first time I saw opera in my life and it was Madama Butterfly. It was that moment I knew my heart BELONGS to opera! Thankfully we have great plays in Greece by Greek National Opera as you can see here https://www.nationalopera.gr/en/. If you ever happen to visit our country you should book tickets!

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