[Met Performance] CID:152750



Don Giovanni
Metropolitan Opera House, Fri, February 3, 1950




Don Giovanni (144)
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart | Lorenzo Da Ponte
Don Giovanni
Paul Sch?ffler

Donna Anna
Ljuba Welitsch

Don Ottavio
Jan Peerce

Donna Elvira
Regina Resnik

Leporello
Salvatore Baccaloni

Zerlina
Patrice Munsel

Masetto
Hugh Thompson

Commendatore
Jerome Hines


Conductor
Fritz Reiner


Director
Herbert Graf

Designer
Joseph Urban





Don Giovanni received five performances this season.

Review 1:

Virgil Thomson in the Herald Tribune

Without Sugar

 

Mozart’s “Don Giovanni,” as presented Friday night at the Metropolitan Opera House, offered freshness both in musical approach and in executant personnel. Ljuba Welitsch, just back from Europe, sang her first performance of the season and her first Donna Anna in America. Paul Schoeffler, just arrived from abroad, sang his first Don Giovanni here. Regina Resnik as Elvira, Patrice Munsel as Zerlina and Jan Peerce as Don Ottavio were all new to us in their roles (and excellent, too). Fritz Reiner has not heretofore conducted this opera in New York. One hardly knows whose evening it was. Perhaps, for all the living stars present and giving of their best, it was Mozart’s after all. And that is high praise, in this writer’s opinion, for Mr. Reiner and his colleagues.

 

Miss Welitsch is the most competent Donna Anna, musically speaking, that we have heard since Rosa Ponselle. She sings on pitch and with full technical mastery. Also with fine dramatic accents. Dramatically, indeed, she is the most impressive and convincing artist this reviewer has ever witnessed in the past. She dominated the concerted numbers Friday night with a penetrating certitude. And if she occasionally, by the very nature of her whitish timbre, failed to blend with the other singers, she did give us in the Mask Trio the most ravishing light scales one has heard since the days when singers really sang. I should say she is a find for the role, and I hope she keeps it.

 

Mr. Schoeffler is also a find. He looked well, acted well and sang perfectly. Actually his handsome baritone voice is better suited to Don Giovanni’s music than Ezio Pinza’s bass was. He sang the bravura airs brilliantly and the recitations with style.  He is an artist and a musician of grand powers. I hope he stays around.

 

Jan Peerece sang the Ottavio airs with a beauty of line and phrase rarely available these days. Patrice Munsel sang and acted Zerlina. Regina Resnik, as Donna Elvira, though almost as satisfactory as the others, both musically and dramatically, needs to work into her role’s difficulties through repeated performances. Jerome Hines has long been a solid Commendatore and Hugh Thompson a believable Masetto. Salvatore Baccaloni, as Leporello, was less kittensh than he has been on some occasions; but for all the sound workmanship of which he is capable, I have never thought him ideal as the Don’s comical and pathetic servant. He is more fun in broader farce.

 

Fritz Reiner’s reading of the score and directing of the ensemble was without f law. If this conductor’s Mozart lacks a shade in sparkle, it has a dramatic line in every way meaningful. His orchestral sounds make sense and loveliness, are of a dryness and clarity incomparable. Sweetness he does not use, nor champagne either in his Mozart mixtures. Nor does he allow any singer on his stage to offer chocolate bonbons to his audience. He keeps everything neat and healthy and clean and honest and direct. His intellectual tone is high, his musical and dramatic communication powerful. He does not need sugar. Neither do we, when he conducts. He makes one feel happy to have put, if only for an evening, all such childish states behind one. His “Don Giovanni” production is grown-up opera, all beauty, distinction and meaning. So, of course, is Mozart’s.



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