Dotty Daughter

By * Robert T. Jones

"I love all those loony old dames," Soprano Joan Sutherland once said of the delicately demented ladies she plays so often in 19th century operas. Despite Sutherland's mien of being constructed of equal parts dignity and marble, friends and colleagues have often hinted that the Australian diva has a healthy streak of lunacy herself. But it took a new production of Donizetti's La Fille du Regiment (The Daughter of the Regiment) at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera last week to prove that Sutherland can camp, shriek, mug and stomp about in boots delightfully without missing a gruppetto or smudging a staccato.

La Fille, composed in 1840, is a tale about a lowly orphan girl who is brought up by a regiment of soldiers, then, turning out to be nobly born, goes to live in a castle and tries to become a lady. Not even Donizetti took the story very seriously. He doused it in music that falls considerably short of such masterpieces as Lucia di Larn-mermoor and L'Elisir a" A more, often seeming to be merely a chain of inconclusive finales. Before the ultimate one, though, there are limitless opportunities for the prima donna to cut up and rattle off fioriture.

Sutherland played the farce nearly as well as she sustained her pealing top E-flats. Faking a drum roll, getting her feet twisted in a minuet, ripping off a dazzling 2 1/2-octave chromatic scale, while tearing up some papers and scattering them into the orchestra pit, she shed fresh brilliance on Donizetti's faded opus and the old-fashioned production imported by the Met from London's Covent Garden.

There was brilliance, too, from Tenor Luciano Pavarotti (TIME, Jan.

31), who trumpeted nine soaring high Cs, all in one aria, provoking the Met audience into a howling, stamping ova tion. But the high point of the evening for many buffs came at the end, when retired Soprano Ljuba Welitch. 58, her flame-red hair blazing, her gestures still full of the pantherish passion that made her Salome a legend two decades ago, strode onstage for a brief speaking role. Oldtimers responded with a tear ful hand-clapping tribute in memory of the past.

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