Great Performance

In spite of reports to the contrary, there was still young life in Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera.

The Met had long wanted to bring Richard Strauss's Salome back to its boards. But since its last performance five years ago, with George Szell in the pit, and Soprano Lily D janel swirling Salome's seven veils, the Met had been unable to get the right conductor-singer team together to do it again, and do it well. And with New York's upstart City Opera Company getting bravos for its lively, scaled-down production (TIME, Dec. 13), the Met knew that if it revived Salome at all, it would have to be mighty good.

In Europe last summer, General Manager Edward Johnson* thought he had found the right singer: magenta-mopped Bulgarian Soprano Ljuba Welitsch, of the Vienna State Opera. Last spring, when pudgy little Fritz Reiner left the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra in a huff, Johnson knew he could get the right conductor, too. Even 84-year-old Composer Strauss agreed with that. From Montreux, Switzerland, he wrote to Reiner, who had first conducted Salome under his stern gaze in Dresden 33 years ago: "That is good news. There are plenty of others who can do Brahms and Bruckner. Opera needs men like you."

"Take the Risk." The instant dour, dynamic Conductor Reiner stepped on the practice podium in his black, choke-collared rehearsal coat, the Met's orchestra began to starch up. After the first session, the musicians even took their parts home to practice Strauss's barbaric score on their own time.

When singing rehearsals started, one singer insisted he knew his role perfectly and demanded to be excused. He got a flat "no"--and a piece of conductorial lip besides. Snapped Reiner: "I learn things in rehearsal, and it is possible that a singer may. I believe you should take the risk."

When buxom, 35-year-old Soprano Welitsch bounced into rehearsal, singers and musicians alike picked up more glow. Actress as well as singer, she seemed to know how Strauss's libidinous, necrophilic Salome (based on Oscar Wilde's play) should be portrayed. Says Welitsch with rapid gestures to head, heart and torso: "To sing Salome, you have to have something--here and here and here ..."

Evil in Purple. What a sell-out audience saw when the curtain finally went up on Salome last week, they would not soon forget. From the pit (which Reiner had ordered lowered to its bottom notch so he and the huge, augmented orchestra could try to keep out of sight), they heard the power, brilliance and detail of Strauss's music as they had seldom heard it before. Onstage, they saw an incandescently evil Salome, flashing in green, purple and red, who commanded the performance from beginning to end. Soprano Welitsch had critics reaching back for comparisons to Olive Fremstad, who sang (but did not dance) the U.S. premiere of Salome in 1907. And she carried the rest of the cast into the spirit of the thing with her: even though some of his voice has gone to Valhalla, Wagnerian Tenor Max Lorenz couldn't have been more convincing as the dissolute, incestuous Herod; and Baritone Joel Berglund, as Jokanaan (John the Baptist), had the starkness of a primitive carving as he hurled his curses on Salome. When the curtain was down, instead of morosely reaching for their coats, the audience stood up and applauded in a 15-minute ovation. Said the Herald Tribune's Virgil Thomson next morning: "One of the great musico-dramatic performances of our century."

* Who last week announced his retirement, to take effect at the end of the 1949-50 season.

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