When Helen Traubel (1899-1972) debuted at the Met in 1937, the company had the extraordinary luxury of alternating the stellar Brünnhildes of Kirsten Flagstad and Marjorie Lawrence. Traubel’s operatic stage debut, at nearly forty years of age, was in the Met premiere of a short-lived English-language opera by Walter Damrosch, The Man Without a Country; two years went by before she was assigned a Wagner lead, Sieglinde in Die Walküre. And it was not until 1941, when Flagstad returned to her native Norway for the duration of the war and Lawrence was felled by polio that Traubel became the compan ..read more

Charles Affron, one of the bloggers of OperaPost, has recently published Just Off Grand. This opera-themed novel is available on Amazon and best searched under the name of the author. Modeled on Honoré de Balzac's Old Goriot (Le Père Goriot), Just Off Grand takes place in and around New York City between the final days of World War II and the end of 1945. Our hero is an ambitious young cantor aspiring to a career in opera. Tracking his progress from a “Borscht Belt” hotel to a dramatic Yom Kippur Eve service in a prosperous West Side synagogue, the novel also stages a riotous dress rehearsal a ..read more

 Recovering the Forgotten Singer is OperaPost’s series devoted to those artists once much admired and now rarely recalled. Some were stars in their time; others left their mark all too fleetingly. Their recorded legacy calls on us to remember them here. Hilde Gueden (1917-1988), Viennese born, was a charter member of the fabled post-War Vienna State Opera Mozart ensemble. The soprano went on to a versatile career on international stages and recording studios. She made her mark in Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’amore and Don Pasquale, in Verdi’s Rigoletto, Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier and Arabella ..read more

Recovering the Forgotten Singer is OperaPost’s series devoted to those artists once much admired and now rarely recalled. Some were stars in their time; others left their mark all too fleetingly. Their recorded legacy calls on us to remember them here. The French lyric tenor of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, his elegant phrasing manifest, was there to serve his contemporary French composers, whether Délibes, Lalo, Reyer, or the most successful of all, Jules Massenet. Among the era’s notable interpreters was Louis Cazette. As you will hear, his full, honeyed sound and affinity for the ..read more

Note to those who receive new posts via e-mail: You must click on the title of the new post, highlighted above in blue, in order to access moving images and sound. Recovering the Forgotten Singer is Operapost’s new series devoted to those artists once much admired and now rarely recalled. Some were stars in their time; others left their mark all too fleetingly. Their recorded legacy calls on us to remember them here. We begin with Florence Quartararo, born in California in 1922. The young Quartararo’s first big break came in 1945 when Bing Crosby invited her to appear on his Kraft Music Hall ..read more

Note to those who receive new posts via e-mail: You must click on the title of the new post, highlighted above in blue, in order to access moving images and sound. February 1, 2022 is the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Renata Tebaldi, a revered interpreter of 19th-century and early 20th-century Italian opera. We would not want the moment to pass without marking the occasion on OperaPost.   Tebaldi was born in Pesaro, a city on Italy’s Adriatic coast. At the age of seventeen she was encouraged to study voice and made her debut in 1944 in the provincial opera house of Rovig ..read more

Note to those who receive new posts via e-mail: You must click on the title of the new post, highlighted above in blue, in order to access moving images and sound.  It has been some months since Operapost published its last entry. We take up our blog again, glad to be joining the individuals and organizations that are bringing more and more music into our isolation. Their number and reach tell us how very crucial music is at this moment and how critical the diffusion of music of all genres has become. Over the years, our posts have centered largely on the history of New York’s dominant o ..read more

Note to those who receive new posts via e-mail: You must click on the title of the new post, highlighted above in blue, in order to access moving images and sound.  In the first of three linked posts (http://operapost.blogspot.com/2019/03/wagners-last-golden-age-at-met-i.html) we undertook a fleeting review of the dramatic soprano during the fourth and last Wagnerian Golden Age at the Metropolitan Opera. The second post (Wagner's Last Golden Age at the Met: II, The Heroic Tenor) was devoted to the Heldentenor, and specifically to Lauritz Melchior. In the third and last post of the series ..read more

Note to those who receive new posts via e-mail: You must click on the title of the new post, highlighted above in blue, in order to access moving images and sound.  In April and May 2019 the Met will revive Robert Lepage’s clunky and famously derided production of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle. Wagnerites avid for this monumental music-drama have every reason to look forward to Christine Goerke in the lynch-pin role of Brünnhilde. And yet, despite this return of the tetralogy, compared with past eras, the Wagner fare remains sparse. The opening decade of the 21st century saw an average of fewer ..read more

Please note: This post is excerpted from Chapter Seven of our book, Grand Opera: The Story of the Met (University of California Press, 2014). In that chapter, we trace the tortured responses of Met management to probing questions concerning the engagement of Black singers from 1927 to 1955.   It was Marian Anderson who breached the Met’s color line at her historic debut on January 7, 1955. The proposal that Anderson be the first African American to sing a principal role at the Met had issued from diverse quarters for at least ten years. Before his death in 1940, Paul Cravath, the Board ch ..read more