Visitor from Vienna

Waiting in the wings for her first cue, the pretty Viennese soprano vibrated like a violin string. Back in Vienna, she had heard that the Metropolitan was a harsh house, so big that a singer could not move around onstage without sacrificing her voice. The hallowed ghosts of the Met were all around her. How would she measure up to the great Gildas of the past--Sembrich, Melba, Galli-Curci?

That November night, in the first performance of the Met's new Rigoletto (TIME, Nov. 26), blonde Hilde Gueden overcame her nervousness and measured up right to the last eighth note. She has done the same in every role she has tackled since.

Maid for Figaro. She turned from the girlish Gilda to the worldly Rosalinda in Fledermaus, and brought that role, until then one of the weakest in the Met's comic hit, up to par or better. As the saucy Musetta in La Boheme, she was gay in her waltz song, movingly sympathetic with the dying Mimi in the last act. Last week she sang her first Susanna in The Marriage of Figaro. Her tone, as ever, was as pure and clear as a mountain stream; her coloratura was as neat as needlepoint. A singing actress who loves "to play on the stage"--and has found that she can at the Met--she made Susanna a maid any Figaro would fall for.

Met Manager Rudolf Bing first spotted Hilde Gueden in 1947, when she was singing in Paris with the touring Vienna State Opera. The next season he got her up to his Edinburgh Festival to sing Zerlina in Don Giovanni. Since then she has been busy in Vienna, Salzburg and Milan, but Bing got her to the Met as fast as he could.

Vivacious and hardworking, Soprano Gueden comes by her acting talent naturally: her mother was a comedy-minded classmate of Elisabeth Bergner at the Vienna Conservatory, and her dream was for Hilde to have the stage career she her self gave up to raise a family. Hilde made her debut as Cherubino in Zurich in 1939, has since made roles such as Sophie in Rosenkavalier particularly her own.

A Word for the Proud. This week the Met's new star was flying home with some wise words for her colleagues in Vienna. For one thing, she had found that the Met was "a warm house," that its audiences "know the fine points of arias and give their applause with perception." Moreover, "the most beautiful voices in the world are here [in the U.S.] ... I have never heard a better Rigoletto than Leonard Warren, or a better Duke than Richard Tucker." And as for Mozart's Cosi Fan Tutte, a pride of the Vienna company, she now has the sad duty of breaking the word that the Met's new production (TIME, Jan. 7) is even better.

Gueden is not through for the season. She will fly back in February to show the Met's perceptive audience what she can do as Micaela in the Met's new production of Carmen.

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