Trick or trill

Tomorrow, the Met presents Halloween entertainment of the Otto Schenk Tannhäuser for afternoon patrons, a performance that also can be seen in cinemas, followed by the Michael Mayer Rigoletto for the evening crowd. With help from the Met’s invaluable performance archive, here is a look back at just some of what you could have seen, and perhaps did see, on October 31st through the years at the Met.

1883: The sixth performance in the house’s history was its first of Ambroise Thomas’s Mignon, featuring Swedish songbird Christina Nilsson in a signature role. The soprano had by then attained the great age of 40, and the New York Times noted, with tactful regret, “It would be futile to ignore the fact that the dozen years that have elapsed since the first [New York] production of Mignon have left their traces, slight though they may be, upon Mme. Nilsson’s face and form. She is no longer the same airy Mignon that she was in 1871.”

1927: Maria Jeritza, “cleaving the sinister darkness of [set designer Joseph] Urban’s Peking nightfall like a cold, infuriated moonbeam,” in the colorful description of Lawrence Gilman, took the measure of Giacomo Lauri-Volpi’s Calaf in Puccini’s three-year-old valediction, Turandot.

1930: Tullio Serafin paced Rosa Ponselle and Beniamino Gigli in an Italian-language L’Africaine. Meyerbeer’s opera, a popular one in the Met’s early decades, would receive 13 additional performances over the next four years before vanishing from the repertory.

1956: “Such conduct is not merely barbaric; it is unpatriotic. What must the many foreigners who were there think of the United States, when the audience at our leading opera house conducts itself in so shameful a fashion?” wondered/clutched Robert Sabin of Musical America. The rhetorical question followed a lengthy description of an inattentive, fidgety, and talkative audience’s behavior at “one of the most civilized of all operas,” Wagner’s Meistersinger. The wretched throng heard (or failed to hear) Otto Edelmann, Lucine Amara and Albert da Costa as cobbler, maiden, and knight, respectively, under the baton of Fritz Stiedry.

1957: Karl Böhm could hardly have asked for a better mid-20th-century Don Giovanni cast for his Met debut: Cesare Siepi, Eleanor Steber, Cesare Valletti, Lisa Della Casa, Fernando Corena, Roberta Peters and Giorgio Tozzi. Irving Kolodin sized up the maestro as “not the most dynamic of contemporary Mozart conductors or the most eloquent the Metropolitan has had in recent years, [but] a first-class craftsman who knows what he wants and how to go about getting it.”

1961: “A heroic gesture on the part of a great artist” was how Osie Hawkins, addressing a supportive audience, described Leontyne Price’s partial performance of Minnie in La fanciulla del West. When her singing voice deserted her entirely, the soprano spoke and vividly emoted her way to the second act’s curtain. During a prolonged interval, Dorothy Kirsten rushed over from her hotel and was hastily fitted into cowgirl duds to save Richard Tucker from the noose.

1963: “[T]he orchestra sounded alive, playing with more discipline, a more resonant sound and a greater degree of rhythmic alertness than it does under most conductors,” reported Harold C. Schonberg in the New York Times, as Georg Solti did his best to lift a Don Carlo revival out of the ordinary. An international cast with nary an Italian included Raina Kabaivanska, Rita Gorr, Richard Tucker, Robert Merrill and Jerome Hines. The 23-year-old bass-baritone Justino Diaz sang the Monk/Charles V.

1970: “Quai modi!” During an onstage ceremony following Act II of La traviata, company stalwart Robert Merrill, performing Giorgio Germont and celebrating his 25th anniversary with the Met, was greeted by eight of his Violettas: Licia Albanese, Phyllis Curtin, Anna Moffo, Delia Rigal, Renata Scotto, Renata Tebaldi, Gabriella Tucci, and the lady of the ongoing performance, Joan Sutherland. Carlo Bergonzi was Alfredo; Richard Bonynge governed the orchestra.

1972: Sir Charles Mackerras made his Met debut as Marilyn Horne sang Orfeo in Gluck’s opera. The Australian conductor would be an occasional visitor over the next 30 years, bringing his scholarly insights to French, Czech, Italian, German, and English repertoire.

1979: Surely there was no malaise in the audience or crisis of confidence on the stage when old favorites including Carlo Bergonzi, Fiorenza Cossotto and Mario Sereni chewed the Zeffirellian scenery in a Cavalleria Rusticana/Pagliacci double bill.

1984: Morning in America! The Met now had an extravagant Bohème that, it was said, would sell well no matter who was in it. In the fourth season of its residency, Eugenia Moldoveanu, Giuliano Ciannella, Myra Merritt and Pablo Elvira were the young lovers breaking up, making up, acting up, and hacking up. This Bohème run, of which the Halloween performance was the third, was Plácido Domingo’s first assignment at the Met as conductor.

1986: Beloved soprano, educator, and raconteur Martina Arroyo capped a 27-year Met career with Verdi’s Aïda, the same opera in which her fellow trailblazer Leontyne Price had bade farewell a year earlier. Like Price, Arroyo faced off with an experienced rival, in this case the Amneris of Grace Bumbry.

1996: More of the night he came home, as Franco Zeffirelli unveiled a busy new Carmen to negative reviews and fewer audience oohs and aahs than in days of yore. “If Zeffirelli had any new ideas about the key figures, he managed to keep his inspirations a secret. The central participants [Waltraud Meier, Plácido Domingo, Angela Gheorghiu and Sergei Leiferkus] seemed left pretty much to their own uneven devices,” wrote Martin Bernheimer. In later years, publication of detailed accounts of the rehearsals would make his observation seem even more astute.

2001: Any New Yorkers not glued to the early innings of a classic World Series Game 4 between the Yankees and Diamondbacks could have taken in the vocal athleticism of Norma. Jane Eaglen, Richard Margison and Daniela Barcellona (making her Met debut this night) prayed, pleaded, schemed, fretted, damned, and forgave as the participants in Bellini’s love triangle.

2008: Neither dancing cows nor Anja Harteros would be seen at the Met for much longer, but on this night in 2008, one could have both. The popular German soprano neared the end of her last Met commitment to date in the Zeffirelli Traviata.

Photos: Richard Termine (Rigoletto), Gary Smith (Eaglen as Norma)