13895 Wagner News 174 - Wagner Society of England

WAGNER AT THE MET
A multimedia presentation given by Dan Sherman on 26th April 2012
Andrea Buchanan
Those of us who braved the truly awful weather to hear Dan
Sherman’s talk at Portland Place School were amply rewarded
for our efforts. Dan gave us a fascinating, lively, amusing and
extremely well-researched gallop through the Metropolitan
Opera’s long involvement with the works of Richard Wagner.
We were shown a wonderful variety of slides, photographs, film
clips and sound recordings.
We learned that the Met have staged 3,600 Wagner
performances to date, making up 13% of their total of opera
events. Lohengrin is the most performed Wagner work (619 times), followed by Die
Walküre and Tannhäuser. Der Ring has been staged in all 130 times.
Dan gave a history of these performances from the 1880s to the present. He played
us a very rare 1903 recording of Johanna Gadski singing Dich Teure Halle and described
the glory days of Wagner productions in the 1910s and 1920s featuring conductors such
as Mahler and Toscanini, followed by a fascinating delve into what he described as “the
Met’s Brünnhilde problem” ie the lack of a suitable house Wagnerian heroine. This
appeared to have lasted for many years in the 1930s until Kirsten Flagstad and Marjorie
Lawrence came along and resolved the issue.
A clip from the 1955 Hollywood film Interrupted Melody about Marjorie Lawrence
(played by Eleanor Parker) and featuring an early film appearance by our very own Roger
Moore showed a highly amusing scene, supposedly at the Met, where Lawrence insisted
on riding a real horse on stage into the “flames” at the end of Götterdämmerung, in divaesque
defiance of the apoplectically enraged Germanic director.
The “Brünnhilde” period of the early 1940s featured the highly engaging Helen
Traubel and the appearance of the extremely young and outstandingly talented Astrid
Varnay. These singers, along with Met stalwart heldentenor Lauritz Melchior and
outstanding conductors such as Leinsdorf and Beecham, made this a golden era for
Wagner performances. Not so alas the 1950s, with the appointment of Rudolf Bing as
General Manager of the Met. Bing did not like Wagner and managed to fall out with many
key Wagnerian singers, notably Traubel, Melchior and even Hotter. As a result, for
example, Der Ring was only staged five times in that decade.
The 1960s saw the appearance of Birgit Nilsson and with that, matters improved
somewhat. When Levine arrived in 1970 aged 27 to begin his long reign in the pit
performances of Wagner returned in force to the Met’s repertoire and he conducted 414
Wagner operas in his time there.
Following her notable debut as Sieglinde in 1972 our President Dame Gwyneth
Jones went on to complete an illustrious career which included no fewer than 94
appearances at the Met. The event ended with recent history and Dan made no secret of
his lack of enthusiasm for the new Lepage Ring.
Dan Sherman is a highly engaging speaker who communicated his enthusiasm for
the subject matter effectively to a receptive audience. We had a great time and we can’t
wait to welcome him back again next year.
– 22 –