Speranza
"Faust," which always crowds the house, was given at Haverly's on Saturday
afternoon, with the same cast as on the [first] night.
The offering for the
evening was the lamented Bizet's fascinating opera of "Carmen."
The audience was
very large and justly enthusiastic.
The part of Carmen was taken by the new
contralto Mme. Trebelli.
Italo Campanini actually appeared and actually performed Don
Jose, and Del Puente was the dashing and popular Toreador.
The orchestra was
well led by Signor Cleofonte Campanini, quite adequate justice being done to the
brilliant and original accompaniments which give the work so high a musical
value and charm.
Mme. Cavalazzi and her corps de ballet gave the promised
"divertissement," thus proving that the ballet feature of the Abbey Company is
not, after all, a myth.
Madame Trebelli was heard
for the first time.
Her voice is a contralto of immense strength and depth, and
of unusual compass.
The upper register, however, has that hardness so common to
contralti, nor has the lower that mellow richness which belongs to the ideal of
this type of voice, and Mme. Trebelli manages it with much
dramatic and musical effect.
Her rendering of the part of Carmen was most
realistic.
Carmen belongs to the very worst type of womanhood.
She is an animal
reinterred by a great deal of the devil.
Also she springs from the wholly wild
and uneducated classes, consequently, her brutal nature has never taken on even
a conventional refinement or modesty.
She is as utterly coarse in mind and
manner as she is vicious in heart.
All this Mme. Trebelli
presents to the letter.
In Trebelli's hand, Carmen is a picturesque, handsome,
flaming, brazen young woman, just such as she would be in real life.
Mme. Hauk's
creation is almost virtue's self, and here, though less startling and seductive
in the first act as in the end, less monotonous.
One soon tires of such utter
wantonness and depravity.
Mme. Trebelli was well received
and applauded by the audience though she awoke no special enthusiasm.
Her
strange, sonorous voice and evident dramatic strength will doubtless give more
pleasure in some less repulsive role.
In pure acting and singing, Del
Puente as the Toreador was the perfection that he always is as Escamillo, the
famous Toreador song receiving its inevitable encore.
It is not only a pleasure
to see and hear Del Puente as an artist. As was well said of him on this
occasion, "There is something about him which excites respect and admiration for
him also as a man and gentleman." Mme. Valeria as Micaela was most charming. The
part is far better than that of Donna Elvira in "Don Giovanni." Her costume,
also, was much more becoming. She gave the lovely air in the third act with
exquisite sentiment, and she ended it, moreover, with a trill of such sweetness,
truth and purity of intonation as is almost never heard from human throats. It
was like the trill of an instrument. It was phenomenal. The audience warmly
recalled and fain would have encored her, but the encore was not
accorded.
Italo Campanini has now
disappointed the public so
often that his
popularity
is almost a thing of the past,
and during the first two acts
he was
scarcely noticed.
But in the third the lion arose from his lair.
Carmen has
become tired of him and his jealousy is aroused.
His crouching shoulders as he
walks stealthily about betray the inward tempest that is slowly but surely
gathering for a terrific outburst.
The occasion comes when Micaela appears to
implore him to return with her to his dying mother, and Carmen does her best to
hustle him off. J
ose's several vain attempts to leave her, his suffocating rage
at her mocking indifference, his fierce reassertion of his rights over her, his
agonized tears; his frantic threats and his desperate breaking away make up a
dramatic "tour de force" not surpassed even by Salvini.
The energy, intensity
and abandon of a perfect whirlwind of passion cannot be better done that by this
most gifted man.
His glorious voice, that voice which less than two short years
ago, out of eight leading singers of the world, was the only one except Myron
Whitney's, that could fill the Exposition Building - whose tones with such
stentorian strength that he could attempt anything from the tenderest sigh of
love to that exultant transport of Siegfried hammering his sword which rose
above all the roar and clang of a Wagner accompaniment, as crashed out by
Theodore Thomas's great festival orchestra - that matchless voice also is
fearfully altered. It breaks frequently. Often it is hoarse or husky.
Much of
its sweetness is gone.
But, even what is left, in combination with his superb
acting, still suffices to rank him among the greatest artists of the lyric
drama.
After the third and final acts he was enthusiastically recalled and
applauded.
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