Regal and distinguished beauty

Lawrence Gilman in the Herald Tribune:

One advantage at least that “Die Walkure” might be said to possess from the point of view of an Opening Night opera is that its principal character, the Walkure herself – in this case the Metropolitan’s most powerful magnet, the idolized Kirsten Flagstad – does not appear until the second act. This made it possible last night for any dilatory debutante who wished to dine in comparative leisure, without missing any moment of Flagstad’s singing to do so with ease. She could dine in civilized tranquility at 8 o’clock, step from her motor a little after 9 at Thirty-ninth Street and Broadway and be in her place by the time the curtain rose to Act Two, with Flagstad as the Valkyrian Wish-Maiden standing above Wotan on the heights ready to break into the jocund opening measures of Brunnhilde’s “Ho-jo-to-ho.”

And so it worked out last evening. When the curtain parted on the Second Act at a quarter after nine the boxes and parquet appeared to an observer in Row D of the stalls to be more than adequately adorned with maidens, matrons, and the necessary, but negligible, backlogs in black and white, while upon the stage garbed in shining mail and armed with a spear and shield, her dark hair flowing from beneath her helmet stood the greatest opera singer in the world, embodying with matchless vividness and vitality a dead genius’s preposterous dream of beauty and sublimity. . . .

The major debut of the evening occurred in the second act. This was the first appearance in America as Fricka of the Swedish contralto Kerstin Thorborg, who created something of a sensation in London’s spring season of opera at Covent Garden seven months ago by her performance in this role. Mme. Thorborg is a woman of regal and distinguished beauty, stately in bearing, slender and tall and straight. She knows the significance of what she is called upon to say and do. She is clearly an actress of intelligence and skill and power. She fills and holds the eye. The voice is not or did not seem last night of even beauty and expressiveness throughout its range, though it will be fairer to wait until after Wednesday’s ‘Tristan” to speak of that with conviction. But of Mme. Thorborg’s power and subtlety and effectiveness in the embodiment of character there was little question.

On this day in 1921 Florenz Ziegfeld presented Jerome Kern‘s Sally on Broadway.

Happy 78th birthday conductor and composer Michael Tilson Thomas.

Birthday anniversaries of bass Ernst Wiemann (1919), baritone Giangiacomo Guelfi (1924), tenor Bruno Prevedi (1928) and conductor Christopher Keene (1946).