Dazzling Don

New York Herald Tribune Music Critic Paul Henry Lang is noted for long, learned phrases, but in one of his reviews last week he was reduced to a simple, heartfelt "Whew!" Object of Lang's whewing: the finest Don Giovanni in recent memory, and probably the most all-round satisfying show yet mounted by General Manager Rudolf Bing at the Metropolitan Opera.

For four years Bing had been looking forward to the day when he could replace his creaking old Giovanni sets and spring the opera's boiling action loose from the Met's antiquated stage. Painter Eugene Berman, in many ways the star of the evening, brilliantly solved the problem with a second curtain halfway back on the stage which could be drawn and closed to let the scenes change at nervous speed. His solid 17th century Seville glowed with rust-brown and gold under hot blue skies, unfolded to reveal a succession of magnificent purple-and-crimson interiors.

Berman's graveyard was bathed in a running, watery green light, and the Commendatore (no longer cumbrously on horseback) glowed dimly through the iron grille of a crypt, like a sea creature in a grotto. Through the mellow moonlit streets moved the kind of cast only a great opera house could muster: Cesare Siepi, Eleanor Steber, Lisa Della Casa, Roberta Peters, Cesare Valletti, Giorgio Tozzi, Fernando Corena, Theodor Uppman, all in top form.

Basso Siepi found his customarily resonant, mellow notes, plus a larger kind of rollicking, swaggering presence that had about it much of the animal authority Ezio Pinza used to exude in the role. What it lacked was only a tincture of malevolence: Siepi's acting was sometimes reminiscent of the reflex actions of a sleek cat rather than of a man willing to defy Heaven to enjoy earth. Soprano Steber presented a rich, blazing, gusty-voiced Donna Anna and Soprano Delia Casa an elegantly anguished Donna Elvira. And as Leporello, Basso Fernando Corena not only lurched and grimaced about the stage in convincing pantomime of a man clutching hard to his sanity but turned in some of the finest singing of the evening. In his first appearance at the Metropolitan, Viennese Conductor Karl Boehm, while distinctly slow-paced, achieved a fine balance between his unfamiliar orchestra and his veteran cast. In sum, Mozart and Met in their glory.

The Met's seasonal curtain raiser was its first production in 36 years of Tchaikovsky's faded period piece, Eugene Onegin. At the end of the second act, the character known as Lenski sings one of the most meltingly popular tenor arias in Russian opera ("Oh where have flown my days of springtime?"), turns to face Onegin in a duel and is promptly shot dead. At the Met last week, Tenor Richard Tucker, as Lenski, was at the top of his luminous form; Baritone George London, etched against a handsomely stark stage set, was magnificently arrogant as Onegin. The only trouble was that his pistol failed to fire, and Tucker was well on his way down by the time an offstage gun went off.

The rest of the opera missed fire, too. Although crammed with some of Tchaikovsky's most melodious music and adapted from Pushkin's powerfully plotted poem, the opera never came off as a music drama. Despite the Met's handsome and expensive staging, the new production of Onegin was little more than a pleasant opening-night showcase for some attractive singing.

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