"Flute-like Santos-Dumont notes"

The New York Times:

After battering along through the rough seas of concert work for several years, Ellen Beach Yaw dropped anchor in the snug harbor of the Metropolitan Opera House last night and, judging by the way she was received, she need not sail forth again until she herself elects.

It was a Saturday night audience and, as always, favorably appreciative of good work. This does not mean, however, that the most severely critical audience to be gathered in the Metropolitan Opera House will not approve. It was in “Lucia di Lammermoor” that Ellen Beach Yaw made herself known to a Metropolitan Opera House audience, and it was her voice and her vocal gymnastics that redeemed this stilted and futile old opera. The mad scene might have been written especially to give her an opportunity to handle her flute-like Santos-Dumont notes.

She hit that high G as promised but it is like Bat Masterson hitting a tomato can with a forty-four at four paces.

And that Saturday night audience arose in its privileged popular enthusiasm and demanded more. The sedate and bored section of the audience, the section that assumes the air of persons conjugating always the verb ennuyer, disapproved. They admitted delicate sibilant sounds and conveyed distinctly the impression that they disapproved of any demand for a repetition.

But several thousand demanded more of Madame Yaw’s work in high G and as it was her first night in the Metropolitan Opera House it would have been cruel to have denied her the privilege of showing them once again what she could do.

On this day in 2008 soprano Angela Meade made her Metropolitan Opera debut as Elvira in Ernani.

Birthday anniversaries of soprano Hilde Konetzni (1905), bass-baritone Gustav Neidlinger (1910), baritone Georg Ots (1920). director Peter Brook (1925) ane tenor and conductor Nigel Rogers (1935).