Margaret Matzenauer News
American opera singer (1881-1963)
- mezzo-soprano
- Austria-Hungary, United States of America, Italy
- opera singer
Last update
2024-04-24
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2016-12-23 22:16:16
There arose such a clatter
[…] carrying various kinds of bundles. Backstage, the singers and musicians had a celebration […] The chorus was absolutely impossible from the point of view of good performing, but in the right mood for the evening. A little bird said that gifts had been passed around by quite a number of the stars and principals and that they had been opened before or during the performance.” Translation: Prohibition was being flouted. The cast included Easton, Margarete Matzenauer, Rudolf Laubenthal and Gustav Schützendorf, but only conductor Artur Bodanzky was said to have been “completely the disciple of true art.” 1936: “The singer is neither a Bori nor a Tetrazzini,” wrote Olin Downes in the Times, getting the obligatory comparisons out of the way, “but if all rôles at the Metropolitan were taken as competently and intelligently as her Violetta of last night we would have an extremely high level of performance there.” […]
2016-07-11 15:00:52
Biblical sense
[…] of Franz Liszt, who also guaranteed a Weimar premiere, for Saint-Saëns to complete the opera in 1876. The premiere was sung in German in Weimar the following season, and then in Hamburg; it did not reach Paris until 1890. The opera quickly spread throughout France and to Monte Carlo, and reached Carnegie Hall in 1892, in concert form. After a few Met performances with Francesco Tamagno, it took the team of Enrico Caruso and Margarete Matzenauer to turn it into a company staple: there has not been a decade without a revival or new production since those 1915 performances. Rumors have Elina Garanca and Bryan Hymel teaming-up for a new production in the 2018/2019 season. Camille Saint-Saëns: Samson et Dalila San Francisco Opera Julius Rudel, conductor 18 September 1980 Samson – Plácido Domingo Dalila – Shirley Verrett Le Grand-Prêtre de Dagon – Wolfgang Brendel Abimélech […]
2013-10-15 05:38:00
[…] music is a pretilly light comic matter trying to characterize the tragic. This music flows along gently and unobtrusively, with a Wagnerian twist and turn every now and again, but never achieves so much as a profile of the drama. Mr. Janacek has theories about song-speech in opera, but he forgot or was unable to make his song-speech say or sing anything definite or apt. So far as the performance on Saturday went, Margaret Matzenauer, the stepmother, Buryja, walked away with the opera. She was the one person on the stage in whom you had any belief, the only one who put anything of the tragic into the tragedy. Her acting, to be sure, was of the type sometimes designated as all over the place, but, anyhow, it made its point. And, after all, peasants, we suppose, are not expected to be subtle. Her singing was Matzenauerian, as usual, […]
2013-01-25 22:58:19
Two Brazilian Charmers – Part Four: The High Price of Fame in Brazil
[…] stay noticeably closed-mouth on the subject of her actions on that particular evening. We can only speculate, at this point, as to her convoluted reasoning behind them. They had a lot to do with the perceptive singer’s suspicion of an unofficial snub by the Metropolitan Opera during the 1919-1920 seasons, a period in which she was asked to take on many of the same roles as the house’s resident workhorse, the stalwart Austro-Hungarian artist Margarete Matzenauer. According to various accounts, Besanzoni became convinced that her Teutonic rival had somehow bribed the claque to despoil her every Met appearance. Curiously, reviews from that time seem to corroborate this notion: there is a marked indication that an organized and clearly exaggerated favoritism for Matzenauer was at the heart of the anti-Besanzoni faction. And, in the Italian’s own blunt assessment of events, “the ‘German’ did everything in her power to prevent me from […]
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