MUSIC The Opera Season
ON Monday night Covent Garden opens its doors for another grand season with a performance of Die Tauberflote, as the wits now call it. Last year, it will be remembered, a serious effort was made to do something about French and Italian operas, which were mixed up with the German works instead of being kept separate. The result was not altogether happy, partly because some of the works bored the public and partly because the choice of singers was not always fortunate. This year the management appear to have given the French up as hopeless and have restricted the Italians to three works, entitled respectively Rigoletto, Tosca and La Boheme. For these operas Gigli has been engaged with a new soprano, Lina Pagliughi, a new baritone, halo Tagliabue, and a new conductor, Vittorio Gui, who, if one may judge from broadcasts and gramophone records, should be an improvement upon some we have had in recent years.
The Magic Flute, we are told, is to be given "in a faithful reproduction of the Schinkel scenery," and the part of Tamino will be sung by Richard Tauber. I have heard people going about expressing surprise that a star from musical-comedy and the films should be cast for so responsible a part. But these good people forget that, before they ever heard of him, Tauber was the finest Mozart tenor of his day. I have heard him sing Tamino's air quite recently with a purity of tone and phrasing which bore out his former reputation—and that in the Albert Hall. So I do not think that the cognoscenti need fear that their sensibilities will be offended by echoes of Lehar. And there is Hiisch to sing Papageno, which he did very well a few years ago.
The Flute is followed by The Flying Dutchman, which it is now fashionable, for some reason I cannot understand, to regard as the best of Wagner's operas. Perhaps, if and when it becomes really popular, it will be ousted by Rienzi and so back to The Feen ! There is a new Senta, Margarethe Kubats'd, whom Sir Thomas Beecham discovered. At least let us be thankful that Covent Garden has for once taken a singer on her merits and not waited until her 'reputation has been endorsed by New York, her fees swollen and her voice nearly worn out. That has happened so often in the past fifteen years.
On the following evening there is to be a revival of Elektra, which has been threatened several times during the past few years. It has the cream of the excellent cast of last year's Salzburg Festival, Rose Pauly and Wide Konetzni, strengthened by Kerstin Thorborg and Fritz Wolff. However much one may dislike the work, therefore--and it remains as hideously ugly as it seemed to its first audience—it is worth enduring for the sake of Pauly's performance alone. She really manages to sing the music and acts with an astonishing ferocity. To signalise the occasion the composer has presented to Sir Thomas Beecham, who will conduct the opera, the first and last pages of the manuscript score—a generous compliment to Sir Thomas's amazing memory for music.
For those who do not care for horrors but like Strauss, Der Rosenkavalier obligingly follows with Lotte Lehmann back in the part of the Feldmarschallin. Then before we return to the staple fare of Wagner's Lohengrin, Meistersinger and Der Ring (with Army Konetzni as the Briinnhilde of the first cycle and Leider, presumably, in the second), we are to have Mozart's Die Entfiihrung ens dem Serail, with Tauber as Belmonte and new scenery by an artist named Aravantinos.
By that time we shall be, or ought to be, thinking about Glyndebourne. As Mr. Christie has decided this year to drop Mozart's German operas and Sir Thomas Beecham has obligingly undertaken to "show that they need no Busch," the "English Salzburg" (as it is called in the adver- tisements) is to make up for the lack of Italian interest at Covent Garden. The season opens on May 21st with Verdi's Macbeth, which was revived with much success in Germany a few years back but has never been given in England. Besides the three Italian operas of Mozart, which have been the mainstay of the Glyndebourne Opera from the start, there is to be a revival of Donizetti's Don Pasquale. This is just the kind of work for Glyndebourne, provided Mr. Christie has been more fortunate than Covent Garden was tr..3t year in finding singers with the right sense of style.
DYNELEY HUSSEY.
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