On this day in 1992 soprano Deborah Polaski made her Met debut as Kundry. 

Walter Price in the Los Angeles Times:

On April 9, American soprano Deborah Polaski made her Metropolitan Opera debut as Kundry in Wagner’s “Parsifal,” an Otto Schenk production, new last year, that she had never seen, and for which she had had only three piano rehearsals. As is usual with late-season cast changes, it was a baptism by fire, all too common on the international opera circuit these days. Eyewitnesses say she received an ovation.

Incredibly, none of the four New York dailies reviewed the event, even though the soprano is a major Wagnerian singer who four years ago created headlines when she canceled performances of “Der Fliegende Hollander” with the San Francisco Opera, saying that God had come to her in her hotel room and told her to sing opera no more. All that has changed.

Birthday anniversaries: prima donna Giuditta Pasta (1798), composer Francesco Paolo Tosti (1847), tenor Julius Patzak (1898), singer and actor Paul Robeson (1898), conductor Antal Dorati (1906) and contralto Cloe Elmo (1910).