One of the new productions planned by Rudolf Bing for his first season as general manager of the Metropolitan Opera (1949-50) was an all-star, Broadway-style revival, in English, of Die Fledermaus. Garson Kanin (the playwright of Born Yesterday and screenwriter of Adam’s Rib) was asked to provide a new book and direct, while Howard Dietz (whose musical theater collaborations with composer Arthur Schwartz included Dancing in the Dark and You and the Night and the Music) would furnish the lyrics. Veteran French coloratura Lily Pons was initially discussed for the part of Adele, and Fritz Reiner was engaged to conduct. The whole production was to be recorded by Columbia Records as part of their ongoing series of complete operas featuring Met personnel.

From early on, however, the original plans began to unravel. Reiner feuded with Kanin over some of the latter’s staging ideas, such as having the conductor face the audience during the overture, and having the chorus lying supine during the “Duidu” portion toward the end of the second act where they would be out of the conductor’s sightline. More significantly, and unbeknownst to the Met management, Reiner had recently switched allegiance from Columbia to its rival RCA Victor, which was planning its own Fledermaus highlights album using Met stars under contract to them, to be conducted by Reiner.

After learning of this, Bing maneuvered to replace Reiner with Eugene Ormandy, the Philadelphia Orchestra music director who was a Columbia artist, but who had had limited experience as an opera conductor. Reiner, furious when he heard he had been replaced, happened upon Ormandy in the office of the Met’s musical administrator, and said with his typical dryness, “I hear that you are going to conduct Fledermaus. Do you know the piece?”

Meanwhile, the rest of the cast took shape. Ljuba Welistch, the “Bulgarian bombshell” who had made such a striking impression as Salome under Reiner during the Met’s previous season, would sing Rosalinda. Wagnerian tenor Set Svanholm was an unexpected choice as her husband, Eisenstein. Although Pons had learned the role of Adele, she would sing it only on the Columbia recording. Patrice Munsel was the Adele for the première, and would go on to record the role for RCA, as would the Orlofsky, Rïse Stevens. The production opened on December 20, 1950, and the Columbia recording (reissued on Pristine Audio PACO 030) was begun four days later.

By that time, however, the RCA highlights recording had already been completed for three months. The new Dietz translation being unavailable to the label, a version written by Ruth and Thomas Martin which had been prepared for an NBC television performance during the 1949-50 season was used. Theirs was a fairly straightforward rendering of the Haffner and Genée original, as opposed to Dietz’s much more self-consciously arch reworking. Most of the original numbers were preserved on the nearly hour-long LP, but some had to be limited to a single verse due to timing constraints.

In his essay on the work in Opera on Record, Alan Blyth preferred this highlights collection to the more-complete Columbia recording, finding that “[t]he young Regina Resnik makes a delightfully dizzy Rosalinde, James Melton a lively Eisenstein, Patrice Munsel a spirited Adele” while “Robert Merrill makes much of ‘Brüderlein’, sorry, ‘Brother dear’” and Fritz Reiner conducts the work “with more brio” than Ormandy.

Mark Obert-Thorn