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Siegfried et al. In the early 1920s, when the late Enrico Caruso died and Soprano Geraldine Farrar retired, the Metropolitan's Italian opera began to limp downhill. But its Wagnerian opera has goosestepped steadily on. When big, blue-eyed Soprano Kirsten Flagstad joined the company in 1935, Wagnerian opera began to boom, played to the biggest box office the Met has known since Caruso's day. Principal drawing card in the Met's Wagnerian productions was Soprano Flagstad's bosomy personality and earth-mother voice. But she could not have done it all by herself. Supporting her was as fine a team of husky, seasoned Wagnerian troupers as could be found in any opera house the world over. Some of them (Elisabeth Rethberg, Lotte Lehmann, Friedrich Schorr, Emanuel List) were veterans of leading German and Austrian opera houses. Some (Lawrence Tibbett, Julius Huehn) were U. S. singers. Many (Kerstin Thorborg, Karin Branzell, Gertrud Wettergren) were, like Tenor Melchior, Scandinavians. Sturdiest of all these sturdy troupers has been gargantuan, jovial Tenor Melchior, for 14 years the Met's leading Tristan, Siegmund, Siegfried, Lohengrin, Parsifal, Tannhäuser.
Melchior and Flagstad, as Tristan and Isolde, are a team whose memory will still be green when the present generation of operagoers is old and grey. Tristan and Isolde are opera's greatest lovers, and to thousands of U. S. listeners Melchior and Flagstad are their incarnation. Though that incarnation is only limelight-deep (in private life Melchior and Flagstad are never more than polite, between eruptions of professional jealousy), operagoers are treasuring it while it lasts. For last month Diva Flagstad announced that she would retire at the end of this season. Soon this mortal pair of immortals will be offstage forever.
Many of Richard Wagner's heroes (Siegmund, Siegfried) are huntsmen. Hunter Siegfried begins his career by bringing in a live bear, earns his spurs hunting a 20-foot, papier-mache, steam-spouting dragon, ends up by getting hunted himself and being carried home on his shield like a dead stag.
A great hunter on the stage, Lauritz Melchior in real life is hardly less terrible. The deerskin costume he wears as Siegfried is the skin of a deer that he shot and skinned himself on a hunting trip in Germany. When he can get a week off from the opera, he makes for the woods of Maine or North Dakota, where he prowls around with a brass hunting horn and a brace of dogs, gunning for ducks, rabbits, deer. He has shot panthers in South America, once bagged a 1,600-lb. bison in North Dakota. In New Brunswick he shot a bear, had it dressed and smoked and toted the meat back to his Manhattan apartment. For weeks smoked shanks and shoulders cluttered the Melchior home, hung in closets, dangled out the windows over busy Broadway. He tried to eat it all, but failed. His friends finally saved the situation by carrying away and loy ally consuming presents of bear meat until the supply was exhausted. Kleinchen does not like hunting. But she likes Melchior. Says she: "I am a married woman, and very happy. I try to make a nice home."