TIME Goes to the Opera

1946: Helen Traubel
"Opening night at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera is an established American ritual. Everybody understands that the cast furnishes half the show and the audience the rest.... Not until the fourth night—after a warmup of Delibes, Mozart and Puccini —will the curtains part on the serious business of a Wagnerian music drama. That night in Siegfried, the fans will get the season's first eye-&-earful of the reigning queen of the Met, heroic-voiced, heroic-sized Helen Traubel."
From: Happy Heroine, Nov. 11, 1946

• Lincoln Center's New Design