the color of tears
Just added to Google’s online archive of Life magazine photographs: over a hundred full-color images from the Old Met in the 1960s. Be prepared for a strong pang of nostalgia as you glimpse Richard Tucker, Leontyne Price, Birgit Nilsson, Franco Corelli, Anna Moffo, Zinka Milanov and many other greats of that regrettably bygone era. [Google Images]
ITDG
“I actually have the Life issue on that gala. I guess I should consider it a collector’s item now.”
That Life issue, plus the spread they issued a few months later covering the opening of the new Met at Lincoln Center is what really got me started going to the opera. I was in high school and was just OVERWHELMED with the glamor of it all. It took me some months but my first opera performances were at NYCO in the Spring of 1967. I tried for the Met but couldn’t get tickets for anything during the first season at LC. I finally made it to the Met during the second Lincoln Center season in late 1967 seeing Hansel and Gretel (preceeded by the ballet La Ventana) and a week or so later, Mourning Becomes Elektra.
What a combination of operas that was for a newbie…but what did I know!
Richard, that was indeed an odd combination for a neophyte but, hey, it worked, didn’t it?
I don’t think I kept the Life issue on the opening of the new Met but I do have the corresponding Opera News issue with all sorts of pictures.
I too was in High School at the time—but I didn’t really discover opera until a friend introduced me to it in college. I can’t tell you how many opportunities I had to by a copy of RCA’s commemorative 3-disc set for the old house—”Opening Nights at the Met.” It was a collection of singers in recordings of roles they sang on opening nights from 1883 to 1965. It included an actual piece of the gold curtain—and no matter how many times I saw it there in the cut-out bin, I never got around to buying it. Sigh…
The nouvelle parterre! In so many ways quite nice, but still — too much blank white space.
Tone it down; have mercy on our retinas!
Make font size of the coments one size larger pleeeeez.
I hate squinting and pressing command + to make it larger.
“I always did think that Cecil Beaton Turandot was really fetching—very fairy tale.”
And he famously insisted on real ermine for the costumes.
“Thank you for the reminders of past elegance.”
Which only makes the utilitarian folding chairs all the more glaring. They couldn’t spring for the little rented gilt dohickeys that grace every stupid benefit and private musicale?
How wonderful it is to see Leontyne as Minnie. You know how she lost her voice during the run, and that they literally got Dorothy Kirsten out of bed to finish the performance for her. After the Met run, Lee had a major vocal breakdown and never sang Minnie again – her performances are sort of “legend” in my mind – the photos make it a fact. Caruso’s daughter gave Richard Tucker the jacket her dad wore when he created Dick Johnson.
And forgive me for sentimental, but it’s also touching to see color pictures of so many operatic greats that are no longer with us and have become legend, much like the beatiful old house on Broadway. Those of you who were fortunate to attend a performance in the old house – what was it like?