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The season's fourth performance of the final opera of Wagner's "Ring" was the most sightly one the Metropolitan audience has seen in many a long year. Astrid Varnay, returning to a role she had sung here for the first time in December, was a handsome Br?nnhilde, enhancing her characterization by meaningful gesture and plastique. Blanche Thebom, a new Waltraute, was also a most personable Valkyrie; her unaffected movement and carriage, along with Miss Varnay's, made the colloquy of the two sisters worth watching as well as hearing.

Hans Hotter, singing Gunther at this house for the first time, dominated his share of the stage without pushing himself into undue prominence and reminded us how strong a role that of Gunther can become when it is really acted from start to finish. Mr. Svanholm, as usual, was a decorative Siegfried, uninhibited by the conventional notion that the G?tterd?mmerung Siegfried should be more mature and kick up his heels less than the younger Siegfried in the preceding opera.

These beautiful people (and who would have supposed that a Metropolitan Wagner cast would ever justify such an appellation?) were not aided by the scenery and costumes, which already, after only five years, look tackier and more outmoded than the production they replaced. The bad lighting, wrinkled cyclorama, and conspicuously mended scrim were effronteries, and the projections of clouds, flame, and other transcendental phenomena were as unawing as ever. But at least one could look at the principals with pleasure and refrain from letting the eye wander to the tasteless and shoddy decors that surrounded them.

Miss Varnay's performance was conceived with great intelligence and insight, but her voice, as sheer sound, was usually anything but blandishing and the big climaxes were beyond the weight of it. Miss Thebom sang Waltraute beautifully, giving the words and music a wealth of communicative inflection, but the bottom range of her voice was too insubstantial and the rest of it a bit too white to develop the full force of the scene. In spite of his curious and individual manner of emitting tones, which he seems to blow out instead of forming and placing them, Mr. Hotter's singing of Gunther's music was in every way valid and he and Mr. Svanholm (in bad voice in the first act because of a cold, which he appeared to override as the evening went on) were the only ones able to give the score much punch. Lawrence Davidson, undertaking Alberich for the first time this season, was accurate but colorless and wholly dependent on the conductor. Martha Lipton made her bow for the season as the Second Norn, in the company of Jean Madeira and Lucine Amara, a new Third Norn. Miss Amara also appeared as Wellgunde, with Paula Lenchner and Herta Glaz as her fluvial sisters. Regina Resnik as Gutrune, Dezso Ernster as Hagen, and Emery Darcy and Osie Hawkins as Two Vassals were familiar members of the cast. Fritz Stiedry conducted magnificently, but on a few occasions the orchestra (notably the first horn) sounded tired from the arduous mid-season schedule.

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