Donizetti * La Fille du Régiment _ finale / "Salut à la France" / Lily Pons _ La Marseillaise ending

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Donizetti
La Fille du Régiment
Metropolitan Opera
Matinée Broadcast
28th December, 1940
The incomparable Lily Pons in her first performance of Donizetti’s irresistible comic opera at the Met; it is her only broadcast as Marie. Equal parts dazzling singer and romping tomboy, she is totally charming. No wonder Time magazine put her Marie on its cover. Salvatore Baccaloni is Sergeant Sulpice and Raoul Jobin is the man who steals Pons’s heart. In this famous World War II-era broadcast Pons interpolates “La Marseillaise” at the end-bringing a cheering Met audience to its feet.
Marie.................Lily Pons
Tonio.................Raoul Jobin
Berkenfield........Irra Petina
Sulpice..............Salvatore Baccaloni
Hortentius.........Louis D'Angelo
Krakentorp........Maria Savage
Peasant.............Lodovico Oliviero
Corporal............Wilfred Engelman
Notary................Unknown
Little Duk...........Unknown
Dance......................Rita Holzer
Dance......................Hortense Kessler [Debut]
Dance......................Josef Levinoff
Dance......................Alexis Kosloff
Conductor.........Gennaro Papi
*Lily Pons interpolated an aria from the French version of Lucia di Lammermoor during Act III.
See review here for information:
Variation for Lucia In French Revision
Donizetti Changed First Act for the Paris Stage
By Pitts Sanborn in the New York World-Telegram:
"Whether or not Donizetti's opera comique The Daughter of the Regiment is likely to repeat at the Metropolitan the success won there by the same composer's opera buffa Don Pasquale last Saturday may be proved today. In any event the cast offers in the role of Sergeant Sulpice the eminent Italian buffo bass who scored such a palpable hit as Don Pasquale, Salvatore Baccaloni, and in the role of Marie, the vivandiere, no less popular a soprano than Lily Pons. There is an interpolation in the score for Mme. Pons, as there has been reportedly in this opera for other impersonators of Marie. She introduces part of a scena sung by Lucy Ashton in the first act of the French version of Lucia di Lammermoor.
Americans witnessing a performance of Lucia di Lammermoor in France or Belgium have been astonished to find decided differences in the first act from the Italian version they have been familiar with. One of the most conspicuous is the absence of Lucy's aria "Regnava nel silenzio" and the appearance in its place of an elaborate solo in several movements, beginning with the words "Oh! fontaine! o source pure!" The last section of this scena, whose opening words are "Viens, toi par qui mon coeur rayonne," has been chosen for interpolation by Mme. Pons and supplied with a showy cadenza by Frank La Forge. The explanation of the divergences is that when Donizetti went to Paris in 1839 to see about a production there for his unproduced opera Poliuto, he prepared a revised version of Lucia di Lammermoor expressly for the French stage. Mme. Pons has had, of course, a long line of distinguished predecessors as Marie, from Jenny Lind and Henriette Sontag to Adelina Patti, Marcella Sembrich, Luisa Tetrazinni and Frieda Hempel."