Treasures from the Metropolitan Opera Broadcasts
by Steve Cohen

A new double-disk cd album from the Metropolitan Opera Association is a great listening experience and a valuable history lesson wrapped together. 17 air-check selections are presented from the Met’s 1940-41 season, in chronological order.

Lily Pons

Jamila Novotna

Zinka Milanov

Enzo Pinza

This was the year just before the United States got into World War II, so it was the last time for awhile for Americans to hear most European stars. Among the leading international artists on the recording are Kirsten Flagstad, Lauritz Melchior, Jussi Bjoerling, Bruna Castagna, Raoul Jobin, Giovanni Martinelli, Zinka Milanov, Ezio Pinza, Lily Pons, Elizabeth Rethberg and Bidu Sayao. They are joined by emerging American artists Rose Bampton, Gladys Swarthout and Leonard Warren plus the already-famous Grace Moore and Lawrence Tibbett.

The repertoire includes generous helpings of Wagner and Verdi, plus unusual items like La Fille du Regiment, Alceste and L’Amore dei Tre Re.

The Met calls its album Metropolitan Opera Historic Broadcasts: The First Texaco Season, 1940-41, which sounds like a promotion for the gasoline company. While the commercial tie-in clearly motivated the selection of this season, I joyfully overlook the motive every time I dip into this album. It would be hard to find a more significant year, just in terms of musical excellence. Add to that the historic drama of a world at war and you have a double reason to treasure this collection.

A new production of La Fille du Regiment was performed just after the French government surrendered to Nazi Germany. In the finale which we hear here, the French-born Pons departed from the libretto and unfurled a French red, white and blue flag with the Cross of Lorraine in its center, the symbol of the Free French resistance movement, and the orchestra added a refrain of "La Marseillase" to Donizetti’s final page.

When Fidelio, Beethoven’s celebration of freedom over tyranny, was performed in February, the homelands of virtually everyone in the cast were occupied by Hitler. Bruno Walter had to flee Europe because he was born Jewish, and here he was making his debut as a Metropolitan Opera conductor. The New York Herald Tribune said that "never before had Mme. Flagstad entered so fully into the spirit of Florestan’s devoted and heroic wife." Ironically, Flagstad chose to spend the rest of the war years with her husband in Norway, where he was a collaborator with the Nazis, and she was then accused of being a Nazi sympathizer. To add another ironic twist, 1940-41 was the season when Flagstad got permission for her boyfriend, the young Edwin McArthur, to conduct one Tristan at season’s end. Only after that did she return to her husband in Norway. (Newspapers always called McArthur her accompanist and protégé, but someone who knew them told me the realtionship was much more than that.)

Jussi Bjoerling was a victim of different circumstances. He was unwillingly restricted to Sweden during the war and made a triumphant return to America and the Met in 1945. In 1940-41 he sang the title role in Il Trovatore and co-starred with Zinka Milanov in Un Ballo in Maschera. Their duet on this album is exciting. Neither he nor his co-star, however, sound anywhere near as poised and mature as they were when they returned after the war. Ballo never was a comfortable opera for Bjoerling, and he normally omitted Riccardo’s big aria even though his voice had the range for it. He might have triumphed in this role when Toscanini asked him to do it in 1954, but his terror about the part caused him to go on a drinking binge and he had to cancel at the last moment.

Milanov was especially dazzling as Gilda in a concert performance of the last act of Rigoletto at Madison Square Garden to benefit the US war effort in 1944. It featured the combined New York Philharmonic and NBC Symphonies under Arturo Toscanini. Then Milanov returned to her native Yugoslavia, which was just being liberated from the Nazis by Marshal Tito. It was widely rumored that the buxom (and married) Milanov became Tito’s mistress. After the war Milanov divorced and remarried (not Tito.) Toscanini was offended by Milanov’s divorce, something which he adamantly opposed although he saw nothing wrong with affairs. Toscanini’s son Walter told me that it was because of this that his father never asked Milanov to sing with him again, even though he thought her voice was ideal for the Verdi operas like Otello, Aida and Ballo which he conducted after the war.

A major event of the season was the 20th-century Italian music drama, L’Amore dei Tre Re, conducted by its composer, Italo Montemezzi, and starring Ezio Pinza as an old blind king who strangles his son’s unfaithful wife. This is one of the very few operas where the leading figure is the bass, but Grace Moore and Richard Bonelli also gave strong performances, making this recorded excerpt memorable. It was in 1940 that Italy delayed and then, in the final week, sent its troops into France to join Nazi Germany in the completion of that conquest. President Roosevelt said: "The hand that held the dagger has struck it into the back of its neighbor." After that, Italian citizens Montemezzi and Pinza chose not to return to their homeland but remained, instead, in the United States for the rest of the war. In 1949, as we know, Pinza left opera to star in the world premiere of South Pacific.

The French dramatic soprano Germaine Lubin was scheduled to make her American debut in a new production of Gluck’s Alceste in 1940-41 but her travel plans became a casualty of the war. Her replacement was Marjorie Lawrence, but she became ill and the young American Rose Bampton got a big break. Bampton was the bride of the Met’s French-repertoire conductor Wilfrid Pelletier. Here she sounds fine, a soprano with some of the richness of a mezzo, which is how she started her career.

The complete Ring and Parsifal were done at the Met that year, but the only Wagner operas to be broadcast were Tannhauser and Tristan und Isolde. Fortunately we have long excerpts from each of these, with Flagstad and Melchior in radiant voice and Erich Leinsdorf conducting. I wonder if someone in Met or Texaco management decided to reduce the number of Wagner broadcasts because so many Americans were appalled by Nazi Germany’s actions. In any event, Flagstad and Melchior live are much more exciting than in any of their studio recordings. Miles Kastendieck wrote about Flagstad that season: "Her voice flooded the house in almost unbelievable opulence of tone" and any listener will agree.

Among the other highlights on these cd’s are Licia Albanese’s youthful Butterfly (she was 27), Leonard Warren’s powerful Alfio and Amonosro, Bidu Sayao’s charming Norina, Alexander Kipnis’s sonorous Rocco, Jarmila Novotna’s adorable Cherubino and Elisabeth Rethberg’s stately Countess Almaviva.

Two of opera’s all-time superstars appear here to good advantage – Giovanni Martinelli at the age of 55 as Otello and Radames and Ezio Pinza in three important roles, as King Archibaldo, Figaro and Ramfis.

The sound quality is excellent. I’ve been familiar with many of these broadcasts since the 1960s, when I first was given some tape copies, surreptitiously in the back room behind a small Manhattan art gallery. This cd set is drawn mainly from 16-inch lacquer discs which NBC made from its network lines, supplemented by privately-made off-the-air lacquers. The difference is like night and day.

The package includes a 236-page booklet with loads of photos, including production shots and behind the scenes candids. There’s a high price tag on this limited edition, with funds going to benefit the opera company, but it’s worth every penny. By the way, the photos dispel the myth that old-time singers were mostly fat, and good looks began only in the TV era. Look at the accompanying pictures of Pons, Novotna, Pinza and Milanov.

MET 24. Metropolitan Opera Historic Broadcasts: The First Texaco Season, 1940-41. Highlights from Le Nozze di Figaro, Un Ballo in Maschera, Don Pasquale, La Fille du Regiment, Tannhauser, Il Trovatore, Otello, Madama Butterfly, Cavalleria Rusticana, Pagliacci, Tristan und Isolde, L’Amore dei Tre Re, Fidelio, Il Barbieri di Siviglia, Alceste, Carmen, Aida; with Albanese, Baccaloni, Bampton, Bjoerling, Bonelli, Brownlee, Calusio, Castagna, Cordon, de Paolis, Dudley, Farell, Flagstad, Greco, Huehn, Janssen, Jobin, Kipnis, Kullman, Landi, Leinsdorf, Maison, Martinelli, Melchior, Milanov, Montemezzi, Moore, Moscona, Novotna, Panizza, Papi, Pelletier, Petina, Pinza, Pons, Rethberg, Roman, Sayao, Swarthout, Thorborg, Tibbett, Tokatyan, Votipka, Walter, Warren.

© Steve Cohen 2002.

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