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"W" "Here was the old sky-shouldering Wagner, undiminished, matchless for power and passion and felicity," wrote Critic Lawrence Gilman. Other critics expressed similar conclusions in less facile language. They remembered how, when Der Fliegende Hollander was produced in Dresden in 1843, certain brothers of their cloth uttered pronunciamentos of pain, amazement; how these individuals continued to lift their eyebrows in the press at Wagner's "aboriginally," thus writing themselves down as dolts who could not believe a great prophet when he stood revealed to them. These same dolts, however, brought on a reaction which, 20 years ago, raised Wagner to godhead, so that persons who professed sensibility to the concord of sweet sounds were expected to genuflect at the mention of the great composer's name. Now, a generation nourished on the chill cacophonies of Stravinsky, the floating, gauzy discords of Debussy, the scrawls of Scriabin, do not find so alarming Wagner's revolutions in harmony. Composers imitate his method, borrow his ideas, leave him his music and his genius; critics call him "The Titan"; deaf people pronounce the W of his name like a W.
Editor. At the Metropolitan, Wagner finds adept interpreters. Conductor Bodanzky has been famed for many years as a student of the composer. A tall, gaunt man, he looms out of the shallow pit like an evening-coated Prince of Darkness; fire sleeps in his baton; when he calls for a kettle drum or a sudden blare from the brasses, his body, as if elongated by concealed springs, thrusts itself half across the orchestra; when the score reads pianissimo, he shrinks into his shirt and trembles like a dervish, supplicating softness. Often a brazen-throated Siegfried stands rocking with melody on a property rock, heard but unheeded, while the audience turns its eyes upon Bodanzky; often, after the singers have taken their curtain calls, the house claps and claps until Bodanzky takes his own ovation. He does not seek to impose a latter-day cleverness upon the barbaric and forthright mu sic he is reading, but conducts as if Wagner himself leaned, with fiery countenance, over his shoulder.
Voices, In the regular Metropolitan Company are a number of singers familiar in Wagnerian roles: Michael Bohnen and Clarence Whitehill who sing Wotan; Rudolph Laubenthal, Sicg-mund; Curt Taucher, Siegfried; Fred erick Schorr, Gunther; Gustav Schuet-zendorf, Alberich. Signor Gatti-Casazza procured, however, two new stars —Mmes. Nanny Larsen-Todsen, Maria Müller.
No operagoer can hear a new Brünnhilde without peopling the stage with the dulcet-voiced, the slim, the heroic or the rotund ladies who have taken the part in past times —Ternina, Gadski, Walker, Matzenauer, Nordica, Litvinne. In Mme. Larsen-Todsen they heard a singer whose voice suffers little by comparison with any of these memorable artists; she sang richly, at times thrillingly, with power and control. Her figure, like her voice, is rich, full; her acting is never equal to Conductor Bodanzky's.