Music: Rationed ho-yo-to-hos

Like a cellar-sitting baseball club looking for a pitcher and a catcher, Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera last week was in the market for an Isolde and a Brünnhilde. The Met needed a top-notch heavyweight soprano to sing these Wagnerian roles, pinch-hitting for Kirsten Flagstad, now immured in her native Norway until the war ends (TIME, June 30, Aug. 4).

The Met's need is more imperative economically than artistically. Chief mainstay of the box office for the past six years have been Soprano Flagstad and gusty, barrel-built Danish Heldentenor Lauritz Melchior. Almost always the pair sold out the house with their hefty love-making in...

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