[Met Performance] CID:49630



Il Trovatore
Ballet Divertissement
Metropolitan Opera House, Fri, January 6, 1911




Il Trovatore (87)
Giuseppe Verdi | Salvatore Cammarano

Ballet Divertissement


Don Quixote: Variations {2}
Mikail Mordkin

Drigo: Le Papillon {2}
Anna Pavlova
Carlos Salzedo, Harp

Chopin: Valse in C-sharp Minor {1}
Mikail Mordkin, Anna Pavlova

Conductor...............Theodore Stier






Review 1:

Review of unknown critic in unknown newspaper

"IL TROVATORE" ONCE MORE HEARD

Opera Continues to Have Its Followers and Proves Effective as an Antidote

Verdi's "Il Trovatore," despite a plot which no Oedipus has ever had the courage to attempt to disentangle, still has its followers. In Boston it is a sort of operatic "Uncle Tom's Cabin;" in New York it is an antidote to such musical hyoscin as Debussy at his most willful, of Humperdinck when metaphysical and symbolic. Like the most insipid of mediums, the whites of eggs, to which as music-drama it bears a strong resemblance, it is an antidote. It is "parmcetin for the inward wound" inflicted by harmonic amuck-running of the Salomaniacs. It may not be quite intelligible. It is entirely pacificatory.

The cast last night contained an actor, M. Slezak, who sang Manrico and had, in Madame Homer, who sang Azucena, one who strives hard to be an actress. M. Slezak's honest attempt to infuse some meaning into this turgid mess of melodrama failed as it was bound to fail, but did so nobly.

Madame Homer's Azucena in the dramatic outline is Wagnerian. To depict a Wagnerian Azucena resembles the creation of an Ibsenian Little Eva. In singing M. Slezak was pretentious and ambitious, but his voice has not the quality or the caliber which go to make a tenor that which is called "great." "In Vienna," he says himself, he is a god. So be it. But then nations differ in gods as in cooking.

M. Amato, as the Lunatic Count, sang with that glorious freedom and beauty of utterance that makes him a Caruso among baritones, and the baritone among Carusos. Madame Rappold displayed her exquisite beauty of voice and her transpontine Italian accent as Leonora, and M. Vittorio Podesti conducted.



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