Antics at the Met

The Metropolitan Opera Association was quite alarmed at the opening-night antics of some of its customers. But the customers and the critics last week were even more alarmed at the Metropolitan's own antics.

The Met had money in the bank and the world's best singers to pick from. But the first three weeks had passed with little but mediocre opera--and sometimes worse. In staging and pace, the Met still hadn't picked up any tips from its Broadway neighbors. The scenery was shabby: that was familiar. The singers couldn't act: that was nothing new. But worst of all, some of the singers couldn't even sing.

Stranded Soprano. Revelers in the Met's Sherry bar hadn't missed much in Yugoslav Soprano Daniza Ilitsch's opening-night performance. Greek Soprano Elen Dosia's bow in Tosca was no better. But the surprise debut of Cloe Elmo, a first-rate Italian mezzo-soprano, was a different story.

Even the Met didn't seem to know what it had in Cloe when she made her appearance as the gypsy in Verdi's Il Trovatore. She had come to the U.S. from Italy with a little opera company that was stranded, bankrupt, in Chicago last winter (TIME, Feb. 10). She had offered herself to the Met, passed muster at an audition and was launched without fanfare. She was somewhat dumpy of figure, but the audience soon forgave that: she could act and she could sing, with fire and with control. Of nine debuts so far, hers was the only unqualified success.

Season-ticket subscribers, who buy their season's supply of opera without knowing what they are getting, were beginning to wonder. The Met had stars who could both sing and act--Melchior, Tagliavini, Traubel, Albanese, Pons, Pinza. Four out of the six had yet to be heard this season. Some stars whom season subscribers paid to see now put in only two or three "prestige" performances a year to keep their names bright for the movies and the cigarette ads, the guest appearances on Sinatra programs, and the fat recording contracts.

New Isolde. Last week, looking for someone to fill one big gap, the Metropolitan served up a real Thanksgiving turkey. To share buxom Helen Traubel's Wagnerian roles (so that Traubel could concertize for half the season), the Met had imported a six-foot, 200-pound German soprano named Erna Schleuter. Opposite her, as Tristan in the season's first Tristan und Isolde, was German Tenor Max Lorenz, who had not been heard at the Met since 1934.

By the time the curtain was down on the first act, the audience was muttering.

Soprano Schleuter sang bitingly sharp, and with a sickening, undulating vibrato. Tristan's frayed baying could only be heard when Isolde was swooning at half-voice. Minor characters lurched about the stage cataleptically. The orchestra got into the spirit of things by burbling and sputtering. Wrote the New York Times's Olin Downes: "One of the dullest performances of Tristan that we recall, with a new Isolde who is certainly, beyond doubt or peradventure, the worst impersonator of the title part in our considerable experience of the opera."

To cover its embarrassment, the Met offered a surprising explanation: Soprano Schleuter had been signed by the Met without being seen or heard--merely on secondhand recommendations, and the name she had made for herself in Germany's shabby postwar opera. It was a common practice, to pick singers that way, added the Met.

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