The Wagnerians

The itinerant Wagnerian Opera Com- pany went to Manhattan and encountered a mixed reception. It opened there with Die Meistersinger. That was unfortunate. It had to meet the severest and most direct competition in the superb Meistersinger which Mr. Bodanzky conducted at the Metropolitan, one of the very finest performances of this or any other season. The Wagnerian company production of the opera last season rode advantageously on the happy welcome which greeted the first performance of the work in New York for a long time. But now, with the appetite a little sated, the handicaps of a traveling and of a more or less improvised company were seen with sharp disillusionment. The scenery was poor, but that might have been unnoticed had the musical part of the production been good. The orchestra was less frightful than last season. It was a newly formed State Symphony Orchestra, organized by Mr. Stransky. It is notorious that new orchestras are not good, and this one, with its lack of unanimity and of smoothened tone, compared not at all favorably with the small but expertly efficient orchestra of the Metropolitan Opera House. Nor was Mr. Stransky's conducting of high quality. He often achieved exquisite niceties of sentiment in this opera of sentiment, but he did not bring out the glorious polyphony with power and clarity, that grand moving of part against part which in Die Meistersinger should dizzy and inflame the listener.

A little excitement was caused by the company's third evening performance. The cast of characters looked staid enough, but the rumor was strong that the soprano announced to sing the Countess in Mozart's Marriage of Figaro would be replaced by no one less than Mme. Ganna Walska, who has sat resplendently in a box at every performance. It is said she has become the proprietress of the company by way of using it as a vehicle for her greatly desired and delayed debut. But Mme. Walska did not sing. The explanation was given that she gracefully withdrew her intention so that the soprano first announced might make her debut. However, it was promised--still by rumor--that at the next performance of the Mozart work she will appear as the Countess.