[Met Performance] CID:70520



Madama Butterfly
Metropolitan Opera House, Thu, December 26, 1918




Madama Butterfly (126)
Giacomo Puccini | Luigi Illica/ Giuseppe Giacosa
Cio-Cio-San
Geraldine Farrar

Pinkerton
John McCormack [Last performance]

Suzuki
Rita Fornia

Sharpless
Thomas Chalmers

Goro
Angelo Bad?

Bonze
Louis D'Angelo

Yamadori
Pietro Audisio

Kate Pinkerton
Minnie Egener

Commissioner
Vincenzo Reschiglian

Yakuside
Francesco Cerri


Conductor
Roberto Moranzoni







Review 1:

Review in the Call

McCormack and 'Madama Butterfly' Draw Large Crowd at Metropolitan

John McCormack made his first appearance of the season at the Metropolitan last Thursday night and shared honors with Geraldine Farrar in another performance of the Puccini masterpiece, "Madama Butterfly," which packed the house in sardine fashion - a most commonplace proceeding at the Broadway playhouse these days of returning veterans. However, that percentage of the audience which was strictly of the McCormack clan, must have been keenly disappointed at the poor showing made by their hero.

Truthfully speaking, McCormack has no business of the operatic stage. Singing Irish ballads and making phonograph records are about his speed. It is one of those queer and inexplicable anomalies of the vocal arts that a singer, with an undeniably fine voice, may airplane skyward to success in one medium and sink beneath the surface in U-boat fashion in another: To this category McCormack belongs. It does not betoken any sign of critical hostility or of any undue shortcomings in the artist himself in making this statement, particularly so, when there is an abundance of evidence to substantiate this opinion.

The role of Pinkerton is after all a minor one, vocally, and McCormack, if he sang as crudely and uninspiringly on the concert stage as he did on the operatic the other night, would not take in two farthings at the box-office. His final aria in the last act was botched atrociously, and at rare moments was much better.

To make up for this delinquency, Geraldine Farrar toned up her own little voice, which has been exceedingly dry and hollow of late, and gave one of her superlative delineations of the Japanese child-wife. The balance of the cast has already been heard before. Moranzoni conducted.



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