Irene Dalis was one of those opera singers who could drive audiences crazy with her intense vocal and dramatic portrayals. During the late 1960s and early 1970s I was a huge fan of hers and saw her in many roles. Her voice was certainly not conventionally beautiful; if you wanted sumptuous Italianate sound you went for Simionato and later for Cossotto. Christa Ludwig, Shirley Verrett and Grace Bumbry had more attractive voices and easier tops than Dalis. But there was something so passionate and incisive about the way Irene Dalis sang everything from Lady Macbeth to Fricka, from Santuzza to Herodias in SALOME, that caused me to plan trips from Syracuse specifically to see her onstage at the Met.
I heard her on many broadcasts before I actually encountered her in the theatre. In AIDA, MACBETH, the RING Cycle, DON CARLO, SAMSON ET DALILA and TRISTAN UND ISOLDE she kept up an unsettling assault on the emotions of a young opera fan with her powerful vocal portrayals; I didn't need to see her to imagine her stalking about the stage as the relentlessly needling Fricka or turning her scathing disdain on Samson in a fury at the end of Act II when her seductive endeavors have failed. She did not have a long, seamless vocal line nor was her top totally secure, but she had this way of delving into the colours of her instrument and of putting just the right stress on a word that would make an unforgettable impression.
I first saw Irene Dalis perform at the Cincinnati Zoo Opera as Azucena in TROVATORE. Her singing was powerful and her acting so passionate; my parents, who really knew nothing about opera, were excited by her performance. Backstage I timidly asked for her autograph and she was very kind as I recall, remarking that it was nice to see young people at the opera. I was 13. Her Leonora was the fledgling spinto Martina Arroyo; my father managed a conversation with the conductor Ottavio Ziino despite the latter's total incomprehension of English.
1966 marked my graduation from high school and my first trips to NYC on my own. Living six hours away meant that things had to be planned well in advance; also in those first seasons at the new Met tickets were pretty difficult to obtain. Orchestra seats cost $17 and I often indulged. Irene Dalis quickly became one of the singers around whose performances a visit to NYC would be planned.
My first experience of seeing Irene Dalis on the Met stage was during the 1967 June Festival in a performance of the Wieland Wagner production of LOHENGRIN. When the new house opened, the demand for tickets was so high that the Met extended its season into June with added performances and some of its biggest stars. Irene's cold-blooded and subtly inflected interpretation of one of opera's great bad ladies held its own onstage with Sandor Konya, the top interpreter of Lohengrin of the day, and the legendary Elisabeth Grummer making a wildly successful and greatly belated Met debut at the age of 57. Irene wore a deep green gown, if memory serves, and seemed like some insidious reptile as she cravenly ingratiated herself to the hapless Elsa and then heartlessly turned against the naive maiden. The ovations that night were huge though nothing out of the ordinary during that golden era.
During the next few seasons Irene Dalis was a major reason for me to take the long train trip to Manhattan. I sent her fan letters to which she graciously replied. I saw her in unforgettable performances of AIDA, FRAU OHNE SCHATTEN, DON CARLO, CAVALLERIA RUSTICANA, TROVATORE, BALLO IN MASCHERA, SALOME and a particularly memorable ADRIANA LECOUVREUR at which the young rising-star tenor from NYC Opera, Placido Domingo, substituted for Franco Corelli at the last minute in an exciting Met debut opposite the beloved Renata Tebaldi in her favorite role. Irene's venom-voiced Princesse and Anselmo Colzani's poignantly human Michonnet turned the evening into a true classic. I can vividly recall both Tebaldi & Dalis graciously encouraging their young tenor colleague and turning their backs on the audience during duets with him so he could send his tones into the big hall and watch Maestro Cleva. Such generosity.
Irene's first UIrica in BALLO at the Met was a five star affair. Her colleagues were Montserrat Caballe, Reri Grist, Placido Domingo and Robert Merrill. These singers gave us a rich evening of vocalism and Irene's gripping delivery of the fortune-teller's prophecies was enhanced by eerie contact lenses which gave the illusion of empty sockets. From the depths of her "Silenzio!" to the sailing harmonies in the trio with Caballe & Domingo, Dalis was on fascinating form.
At the June Festival in 1971, Irene had one of her great personal triumphs at the Met with a grand-scaled portrayal of Azucena in TROVATORE which evoked frantic ovations. The Dalis voice was totally 'on' throughout the range while she portrayed the demented gypsy with her accustomed fervor. Backstage afterwards, she was mobbed and they opened the greenroom to accommodate all the fans who wanted to meet her.
There were two roles in which Irene Dalis left particularly powerful memories. The first was Amneris in AIDA. In the photo left she is lording it over Leontyne Price in their Act II confrontation. The Dalis voice, with its potent chest register, left such an indelible impression on so many phrases of this opera that to this day when I think about the music of Amneris, it is her voice I hear.
The Judgment Scene of Act IV of the Verdi opera, in which Amneris seeks to save her beloved Radames from a sentence of death for treason, was the high point of Irene's interpretation. Here the character of Amneris who has been so proud and manipulative in the earlier acts is brought into acute human focus when her power as Princess of Egypt carries no weight with the condemning priests; she is reduced to begging only to have the implacable judges walk off chanting "Traditor!" In the final moments, Amneris turns on the priests and delivers a fiery curse on them before collapsing in despair.
On June 28, 1969 Irene Dalis sang Amneris with the Met in a concert performance in Central Park. She was in extraordinary voice and had the audience in the palm of her hand from her opening phrase. The massive crowd was so keyed-up by the time Irene came to the Judgment Scene that the excitement was palpable. I don't think she ever topped this performance and aside from all her incisive dramatic phrases and startlingly vivid declamation of the words, she found the most shattering colours of remorse midway thru the scene when Radames has rejected her help. After the trial, in which Radames utters no word of self-defense, Amneris attempts to bargain with the priests but they will have none of it. Flinging out her scalding "Anatema su voi!" Irene brought the scene to a heart-pounding climax. The very instant she let go of her final top note the audience at Sheep Meadow erupted in a delirious ovation which went on for several minutes. Irene has to bow again and again.
Having lost everything, the once-proud Amneris appears at the very end of the opera to pray over the tomb where Radames has been buried alive. She does not know that her rival Aida has secretly entered the tomb and is dying in Radames' arms. The quiet ending of the opera with Amneris intoning "Pace...pace" is captured in this dramatic photo of Irene Dalis from the Met stage.
You wouldn't think there could be anything to top her Amneris, but in 1966 at the Met premiere of DIE FRAU OHNE SCHATTEN Irene Dalis found the role of a lifetime. In one of the richest casts ever assembled - Leonie Rysanek, Christa Ludwig, James King and Walter Berry, conducted by the immortal Karl Bohm - Irene came close to stealing the show. As the Nurse, in whose care the Empress has been placed by her father {the enigmatic Keikobad}, Irene's singing caught the myriad complexities of her character: maternal, scheming, ironic, tender and brutal by turns. The vocal writing races up and down thru the registers, cascading through demanding turns of phrase into the deepest chest tones and ending the second act on a searing top B. Irene took it all in stride, her acting as colorful as her singing and burning the words into the listener's memory where I can still hear them today as if she were singing them directly to me. Leonie Rysanek was THE Empress of her time - of all time, I suggest - and she sang it here and in Europe with every interpreter of the Nurse who was willing to attempt the impossible role. She once said she rated the Irene Dalis interpretation as ideal.
Immortal moment: anyone who ever saw the Met's FRAU with Rysanek and Dalis as Empress and Nurse will never forget this scene in the third act where the Empress rejects the Nurse and goes to her trial in Keikobad's temple. The scene, starting with their arrival by boat at the tower gates, contains some of the most brilliant and taxing vocal writing Strauss ever conceived. The Rysanek Kaiserin was stupefying in its vocal power and intensity and Irene Dalis kept pace with her every step of the way. I once experienced FRAU from the front row of the orchestra, right behind Maestro Bohm's left shoulder. An unforgettable evening.
Here's Irene in her dressing room after a performance of FRAU, still wearing her stage make-up. You wouldn't think to look at her that she'd just sung one of the most demanding opera roles ever created. It was always a great experience to visit her backstage; she was so kind and she always remembered me. It was an unfortunate happenstance when she was scheduled to sing Klytamnestra in ELEKTRA at the Met - surely a perfect role for her - and on the day the scheduled Elektra took ill and they were unable to find a replacement. They were forced to change the opera to FIDELIO and New York never got to experience Irene's interpretation of opera's most maniaical mother.
There is only one commercial recording of Dalis to my knowledge: a 1962 PARSIFAL from Bayreuth conducted by Hans Knappertsbusch. It has gotten generally very positive reviews and when I asked my friend Dmitry his impressions of the Dalis Kundry he said he liked it just fine. To me it is not representative of her best - despite many exciting passages - and I do believe that she had been ill that summer and in fact I think she canceled at least one of the performances. There are pirates of her many Met broadcasts; her 1961 RING roles (Fricka and Waltraute), the 1970 AIDA and both her FRAUs from the airwaves are among my favorites.
After retiring from the operatic stage, Irene Dalis returned to San Jose to teach and eventually founded Opera San Jose where she continues to serve as General Director. We simply have so few of these larger-than-life operatic performers today and I am thankful to have experienced so many of her performances and to have known her.
Tuesday August 28, 2007 - Final trek to the Open for me this year; I thought about getting a ticket for Thursday but the crowds have been unbearable and it seems to me that the Open has become so thoroughly commercialized with the emphasis being on the 'event' rather than on serious tennis-watching. I do love watching tennis 'live' as opposed to on the telly and to be able to see some of the players I like whose matches don't usually get on-air exposure.
It was a long five-set match with the dynamic shifting between Danai {photo, left} and his opponent, Wayne Odesnik. Odesnik is the type of tennis player I really dislike; whatever his assets as an athlete - and he has quite a few - they are undone by his poor sportsmanship and unpleasant personality. He threw temper tantrums when line calls went against him. I was sitting on the service line and he got the benefit of several of his long serves not being called out; but when things did not go his way there were pouting blow-ups from the crybaby, muttering nasty things at the chair umpire under his breath. He once even accused the innocent Danai of laughing at him; Danai wears a genial smile throughout his matches, except for those moments of self-deprecation when he misses an easy shot. Odesnik needed the trainer - twice - but got an attitude when Danai asked for treatment. Then there was the slamming of the racquet to the ground with prima donna flourish. At the end, when he finally won, Odesnik suddenly tried to be Mr. Nice Guy, throwing his arm around Danai as they walked to shake hands with the umpire. I hate to think how he would have behaved if he had lost. Danai is a delight to watch and I wish him well in his continuing career. I will avoid Mr. Odesnik's matches in future until he grows up.
Then over to watch Shuai Peng vs Flavia Pennetta; Peng totally dominated the first set. Pennetta could not seem to get anything going. Early in the second set, Peng was treated for an ankle problem. The combination of a slightly slowed-down Peng and a geared-up Pennetta changed the tone of the match. Pennetta began to show off her impressive arsenal of shots while Peng seemed tired and preoccupied. Pennetta {photo, left} won he match and earned the audience's approval; an attractive and very trim lady, she might have become a ballerina at La Scala had she not decided to play tennis instead.
Jose Acasuso {photo, left}, who gave Paradorn a tough match last summer, was playing and I watched that match for a while and then took a trip to Louis Armstrong where Francesca Schiavone was dismantling Natalie Dechy. What's happened to Dechy? She looked so out-of-sorts. Doubling back, I watched the last few games of David Ferrer's match against Florian Meyer. I had never seen Ferrer play before; what a nice, animated player he is - his energies always focussed on the matter at hand. In a strong three-set win, he had the crowd behind him without deterring from Meyer's efforts. 
I made a last walkabout of the Center; most of the courts were abandoned though Jose Acasuso was still plugging along. On the #7 train coming home I realized that - despite the massive crowds, the expensive food, the horrible behavior of the little kids (it's the parents who are at fault, actually) and the bizarre inattention of people who have paid to watch tennis and then find all sorts of ways to distract themselves - I really love watching live tennis. The Lino/Cho match was the clincher for me and made me realize that, for all the negatives, I would surely go back next summer.
