The Metropolitan Opera Murders

November 15, 2021
The headline news about this reprinting of the famed soprano's 1951 behind-the-scenes whodunit isn't in its plot but in its byline. Someone is clearly trying to kill soprano Elsa Vaughn, but whoever it is keeps missing and hitting someone else. Following several earlier close calls, retired Heldentenor Rudolf Salz has to be carried out of the prompter's box after he succumbs to the strychnine in a bottle of Scotch originally purchased by business manager Howard Stark for Elsa, who's performing onstage as Br�nnehilde: "Perhaps it was only natural that her next note was a full octave off pitch." Tenor Karl Ecker, singing Siegmund, delivers the perfect epitaph: "Salz should have died elsewhere." When rising rival soprano Hilda Semple, a Salz prot�g�e who's been under contract to him, is shot to death as she sits at Elsa's dressing table during intermission a few days later, Traubel dryly observes: "The second and third acts of Tristan und Isolde as sung that afternoon were barely adequate." Unfortunately, gems like these are few and far between, dominated though not upstaged by backstage intrigues swirling around meddlesome patron Edwina DeBrett; her wealthy husband, Stanley; Stanley's daughter, Elsa's ambitious pupil Jane; and his late sister, Ivy, whose marriage to Karl was cut short a year ago when she was killed in a home robbery. Then why, wonders Lt. Sam Quentin, has a pin the thief stole just now turned up in a pawnshop? The big reveal comes early on, when editor Leslie S. Klinger identifies Traubel's ghostwriter as Harold Q. Masur, who went on to write a series of legal thrillers more thrilling than this. The obvious audience: opera lovers whom the pandemic has denied live performances. They'll get to visit the old Met too.

COPYRIGHT(2021) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

November 29, 2021
First published in 1951, this slightly above average mystery from Traubel (1899–1972), the leading soprano at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in her day, opens onstage during a performance of Die Walküre. Elsa Vaughn, a celebrated Wagnerian soprano who’s performing the role of Brünnehilde, watches in horror as Rudolf Salz, who’s filling in as prompter, convulses and dies. It soon becomes apparent that Salz was poisoned, and Elsa may have been the intended victim. Elsa teams up with Lt. Sam Quentin, a police detective, to discover the murderer among a colorful cast that includes an opera manager named Aaron Van Cleff (as in the musical notation) and members of a prominent family named DeBrett (as in the guide to the English peerage). Meanwhile, enormous egos collide over Wagnerian interpretation amid bawdy backstage doings. Series editor Leslie Klinger provides his usual enlightening annotations. While by no means a classic, this entry in the Library of Congress Classics series is good fun for opera lovers.