Music: Dazzling Dutchman

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When he was 26, Richard Wagner, with his wife Minna and his dog Robber, boarded a small (100-ton) Prussian-owned vessel and set sail from Pillau for London. The stormy passage that followed took more than three weeks instead of the customary eight days, and the superstitious crew angrily blamed Wagner and his wife for their bad luck. From the experience of that voyage Wagner conceived his opera The Flying Dutchman, which was never popular in Wagner's own lifetime, has met with varying luck ever since. Last week, after an absence of nine years, it appeared on the stage of Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House—and provided General Manager Rudolf Bing with one of the surprise hits of the season.

The Met's Dutchman was not a new production: it used the spectacular, old-fashioned sets done by Charles Elson in 1950. Musically, the production was markedly better than nine years ago. The early-Wagner score—shot through with popular Italian and French influences—was rousingly conducted by 29-year-old Thomas Schippers. In the role of the Dutchman (equated by Wagner with both Odysseus and the Wandering Jew) Baritone George London was convincingly demon-ridden, his voice fresh, passionate but controlled. In the comparatively minor role of Daland, the Norse sea captain, Bass Giorgio Tozzi—convincingly costumed in turtleneck sweater, jacket and boots—sang with warm-timbred verve, while Tenor Karl Liebl turned in his best performance of the season as the huntsman Erik. But the real standout of a standout cast was Soprano Leonie Rysanek in the role of Senta, the self-sacrificing heroine who in characteristic Wagnerian style must die to secure the redemption of her lover. Her singing in the usually static second act was superb; her soprano rose and fell around London's steady tone, shot off in bursts of color, swooned and sighed with a purity that had the audience breathless. It was the finest Senta in Metropolitan memory—and one of the finest performances in Vienna-born Soprano Rysanek's distinguished career.