When the Metropolitan Opera Company was begging for its life last winter its most eloquent plea was the stirring performances given in the Wagner Matinee Cycle. Not since the War had New York heard such German opera. Most of the Met's other performances came nowhere near paying their own way but the Wagner matinees sold out to the doors. This week a new Wagner cycle begins with subscriptions topping last year's. This week's opera is Tannhauser. Next week The Ring of the Nibelung begins, the four operas to be given at weekly intervals through March 9.
Reasons for the growing interest in Wagner are the contingent of excellent German artists now at the Met; the Company's acquisition last year of Soprano Frida Leider, Contralto Maria Olszewska and Basso Ludwig Hofmann; the improvement of Tenor Lauritz Melchior since Conductor Arturo Toscanini rehearsed him in Bayreuth summer before last; the quickened inspiration of Conductor Artur Bodanzky. During the War New York preferred to do without German opera. It took the conservative Met a good ten years to build up its German wing to something like pre-War strength. During that time a new generation of Wagner enthusiasts grew up, to learn that the operas are not dull because they are long, that the Ring's complicated plot and hundred-odd motifs are well worth studying since they build up into such a colossal whole.
The tremendous scope of the Ring with its mass of detail is frightening to many a first hearer. Richard Wagner was 26 years writing it, doing first the poem of Die Gotterdammerung, prefacing it then with Siegfried, Die Walkure, Rheingold. Before the music was written Wagner turned out Tristan and Die Meistersinger, operas that he trusted to keep him before the public while the great tetralogy was in its slow making. The Ring's music was written chronologically. Its design is like a symphony with Rheingold corresponding to an introductory first movement; Walkure to a tender andante; Siegfried to a scherzo and Die Gotterdammerung to a great finale. The four operas take 15 hours to give.