ÍøÆغÚÁÏ

During the late 1920s and the 1930s, a period remembered as one of the golden ages of Wagnerian singing, Emanuel List (born Emanuel Fleissig) was counted as among the finest of basses and specialized in the villain roles in the operas of Wagner and others. He was tall and physically imposing, adding a commanding and dangerous element to his rich, deep, and dark singing tone.

He started his singing career as a boy soprano in the chorus and some solo work on the roster of the Theater an der Wein in Vienna. His family moved to the United States, where he was a vaudeville singer while studying voice with Josiah Zuro.

He returned to Vienna in 1920 for more training and to further his singing career, and soon made a debut at the Volksoper in 1922 in the major role of Mephistopheles. He moved to Berlin in 1923 to accept an engagement as a member of the Charlottenburg opera company, and joined the company of the Berlin State Opera (Staatsoper) in 1925. In the same year, he made a Covent Garden debut as Pogner in Die Meistersinger. He remained a member of the roster of the Staatsoper, making a specialty of such Wagnerian roles as King Mark (Tristan und Isolde), Hunding (Walküre) and Hagen (Götterdämmerung), as the implacable high priest Ramfis in Verdi's Aida, and in his most famous role, Baron Ochs in Richard Strauss' Der Rosenkavalier. He began singing in the Salzburg Festival in Austria, taking the Mozart roles of Osmin (Abduction from the Seraglio), and the Commendatore (Don Giovanni), and Rocco in Beethoven's Fidelio, in addition to King Mark. He appeared in the 1933 Bayreuth Festival as Hunding and Hagen, in addition to Fafner as the giant in Rheingold and as the voice of Fafner's transformed shape of the Dragon in Siegfried. As a Jew, he prudently left German in 1933 and made his debut that year at the Metropolitan Opera in New York as the Landgrave in Tannhäuser. He was a member of the Met company from that year until 1950, and also sang regularly at the opera houses of San Francisco, Chicago, and Buenos Aires, and became a naturalized American citizen. Shortly before retiring, he made his first appearance in nearly 20 years in Berlin in 1950.

Among his famous recordings are performances as Hunding in the cutting of the complete first act of Die Walküre, and as King Mark in the equally famous 1936 Melchior-Flagstad Tristan und Isolde.

Jarmila Novotná became a celebrity, respected by the leading musicians of her time, first in Europe and later in America. Although Novotná's lyric soprano did not quite match in sheer loveliness to its owner's physical appearance, it was amply attractive and always at the service of an unusually perceptive and highly musical artist.

Beginning her voice training in her middle teens, Novotná principally worked with the famous dramatic soprano Emmy Destinn. Destinn set down a focused approach to vocal study and first led her pupil to the coloratura repertory. Later, Novotná moved into lyric roles and remained in that fach for the duration of her career. The young soprano was not yet 18 when she made her successful June 28, 1925, debut at the Prague Opera as Marenka in Smetana's The Bartered Bride. A still greater sensation surrounded her performance in La traviata six days later. During her studies in Italy, she appeared in several venues in that country, including Verona, where she was approached by the claque and, having no money with which to pay them, feared the worst. She prevailed in Rigoletto, however, and was called upon to encore Gilda's big scene. Her Duke was Giacomo Lauri-Volpi. Her success there led to a L'elisir d'amore at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples, where she sang with Tito Schipa. Despite tempting offers from several Italian houses, Novotná accepted a contract with the Kroll Opera in Berlin, then-regarded as one of Europe's most progressive companies. Under the musical direction of Otto Klemperer and the stage supervision of Gustave Gründgens, the soprano made great advances as an artist. When the Kroll was closed in 1931, Novotná was given a position with the parent Staatsoper and performed under such important conductors as Leo Blech, Erich Kleiber, and George Szell. Later performances with stage director Max Reinhardt at the Theater am Kurfürstenendamm added still more depth to Novotná's interpretations. With the rise of National Socialism, she transferred her activities to Vienna where she enjoyed enormous popularity from 1933 to 1938. Franz Lehár sought her for his Giuditta and, in 1934, she and Richard Tauber sang the work to cheering crowds at the Staatsoper and continued to regularly appear in it until 1938. Novotná became equally popular at the Salzburg Festival, her Pamina under Toscanini's baton being especially memorable. Her other Mozart roles there included Fiordiligi, Cherubino, and the Countess. After the Anschluss, she sang there no longer, nor did she continue at the Staatsoper. Asked by Toscanini to come to New York for performances of La traviata and Falstaff that failed to materialize due to an unsatisfactory venue, she was taken by the maestro to Metropolitan Opera general manager Edward Johnson, who offered her a contract. Her American debut actually took place, however, at San Francisco in a 1939 production of Madama Butterfly. Following her January 5, 1940, Metropolitan debut as Mimi, the soprano sang at that house for a total of 16 seasons, distinguishing herself in Mozart and as an alluring Manon and an impetuous Octavian. Hoping to reside once more in Europe after WWII, Novotná and her husband, Baron Daubek, found their property in Czechoslovakia confiscated by the Communists. After living in America once more, the couple eventually retired to Vienna. Novotná also enjoyed considerable success in film.

Part of the wave of great Hungarian conductors who took over American musical life just before and after World War II (the others included Fritz Reiner, Antal Dorati, and Eugene Ormandy), George Szell quickly transformed a middling Midwestern orchestra into one of the nation's Big Five. His cultivation of the Cleveland Orchestra set an example of discipline and hard work that gradually helped raise the standards of orchestras across America.

Although born in Hungary, Szell was raised in Vienna, where he studied composition with Eusebius Mandyczewski and piano with Richard Robert; he also studied composition in Prague with J.B.. Foerster. Szell was a wunderkind, playing a Mozart piano concerto with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra when he was 10, and composing a number of quite solid chamber and orchestral works in lush late Romantic style as a child and teenager. He was a comparatively elderly 17 when he conducted the Berlin Philharmonic in a program including one of his own compositions.

Despite these early successes, Szell rose through the conducting ranks in the traditional way of the period, with a series of opera positions: Royal Opera of Berlin (1915-17), Strasbourg (1917-18), Prague (1919-21), Darmstadt (1921- 22), and Düsseldorf (1922-24). Szell's first prestigious post came to him in 1924, when he was named first conductor of the Berlin State Opera; he simultaneously served as a professor at Berlin's Hochschule für Musik. In 1929, he moved on to become general music director of the German Opera and Philharmonic in Prague, where he remained until 1937. All this activity effectively ended his career as a composer, although he did eventually produce an interesting orchestration of Smetana's String Quartet No. 1, "From My Life."

Szell began focusing more on orchestral repertory in the 1930s; he made his U.S. debut as guest conductor of the St. Louis Symphony in 1930, and in 1937 he was appointed conductor of the Scottish Orchestra in Glasgow while maintaining a steady relationship with the Residentie Orkest in The Hague. Szell was in America in 1939 when war broke out in Europe; he remained in the U.S. through the war, first depending on guest engagements and then, in 1942, becoming a regular conductor at the Metropolitan Opera, where he was especially praised for his Wagner performances. In 1946 Szell took American citizenship and became music director of the Cleveland Orchestra, a post he held for 24 years (he was also the New York Philharmonic's music advisor and senior guest conductor during the last two years of his life).

Although Szell made a few recordings in Europe in the 1950s and '60s for Decca and in Cleveland at the very end of his life for EMI, as well as scattered 78-era efforts, the bulk of his substantial discography was the result of his long collaboration with Columbia Records in Cleveland.

There, Szell had inherited an able but ordinary orchestra and, through no little tyranny, molded it into one of America's finest. A Szell performance was remarkable for its textural clarity, chamber-like balances, and precision of attack and release. He drilled his orchestra mercilessly, even in works it had performed with him not long before. Szell was particularly admired for his performances of Austro-Germanic classics from Haydn to Richard Strauss, his sharp renderings of works by a select few twentieth-century composers (Bartók, Prokofiev, Janácek, Walton), and his idiomatic way with Dvorák; indeed, some collectors maintain that Szell's monaural, early-1950s recording of Dvorák's Eighth Symphony with the Concertgebouw Orchestra has never been equaled. His treatment of French composers, on the other hand, was criticized for its lack of atmosphere, and detractors maintained that he achieved precision at the expense of emotional expression. To those who demanded a warmer approach to his beloved Mozart, however, Szell is said to have retorted, "One does not pour chocolate sauce over asparagus." ~ James Reel

New York's Metropolitan Opera Orchestra dates back as an established ensemble almost to the Metropolitan Opera's founding in the 1880s. The orchestra has been led by legendary conductors of the 20th and 21st centuries, including Arturo Toscanini, George Szell, and James Levine.

New York upper-crust families launched an effort to establish a world-class opera company in 1880, and the Metropolitan Opera was launched with the 1883-1884 season. August Vianesia was the music director but was soon replaced in 1886 by Anton Seidl, a protégé of Wagner who molded the orchestra into a first-class group along German lines before departing in 1897. Other important early conductors included Alfred Hertz, Gustav Mahler (1908-1910), and Toscanini, who headed the orchestra from 1908 to 1915. Orchestra members by the 1930s earned starting salaries of some $10,000, less than the superstar singers the company engaged but more than what most other orchestras paid, and ever since then, a seat in the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra has been a plum assignment for orchestral musicians.

Through the middle of the 20th century and beyond, the Metropolitan Opera was led by European-born conductors who were also prominent in the field of orchestral music, including Szell, Bruno Walter (1941-1951), Fritz Reiner, Erich Leinsdorf, and Dmitri Mitropoulos. The company pioneered operatic broadcasts on radio (from 1930) and television (from 1940), which arguably increased the prominence of the orchestra since audiences experienced no visual component; broadcasts, now including those via the Internet, have remained important to the Met's mission. Doubtless, the most significant of the orchestra's more recent conductors has been James Levine, whose career ended under a cloud but who shaped bold interpretations, many of them in part orchestrally based, for decades. Levine was succeeded by Fabio Luisi and by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, music director since 2018. The orchestra has issued several recordings independent of operatic productions, including one of Wagner's orchestral music and, in 2022, A Concert for Ukraine. ~ James Manheim

The Chorus of the Metropolitan Opera has been instrumental in the establishment and continuation of excellence that has marked the Met as one of the premier opera houses in the world. With a flexible roster of professional singers, the Chorus is able to adapt to meet the demands of one of the integral parts of opera performance since the genre's birth. With the Met's continued outreach and ability to incorporate new media, the Chorus has been heard on hundreds of recordings and seen by audiences around the world on video, including a groundbreaking live-broadcast stream to movie theaters.

The Metropolitan Opera was founded in 1883 after an effort led by New York's Roosevelt, Morgan, and Vanderbilt families to establish a world-class company. Right from the start, the new company was a success, and its Orchestra and Chorus have remained vital to its mission. Auguste Vianesi was the company's first music director, and a long list of notable names have followed, including Arturo Toscanini, Bruno Walter, and James Levine, among many others. The role of chorus master of the Metropolitan Opera Chorus has also been held by a distinguished list, most notably Kurt Adler, who held this title, as well as that of principal conductor for a time, from 1943 until 1973.

The Metropolitan Opera has been on the leading edge of technology practically since its founding. In the first years of the 20th century, around 140 recordings of the Met were made on phonograph cylinders, named the Mapleson Cylinders, between 1901 and 1903. In 1910, the company began broadcasting, with live performances transmitted to a relatively nearby area. However, in the 1930s, these live productions were broadcast nationally by several major networks and eventually by the Met itself on its Metropolitan Opera Radio Network. Similarly, with the advent and wider preponderance of television, the Met began broadcasting live performances to households in the 1940s while also dabbling in distributions to movie theaters. These traditions have continued and evolved with technology and, as of the early 2020s, include live performances simulcast in high definition to movie theaters, taped performances broadcast on television, a dedicated streaming radio station, and a litany of well-regarded recordings. Yannick Nézet-Séguin has served as the Met's music director since 2018, and as of 2023, Donald Palumbo held the title of chorus master. ~ Keith Finke