Recovering the Forgotten Singer, 3: Hilde Gueden

PLEASE NOTE: Charles Affron, one of the bloggers of OperaPost, has published Just Off Grand. This opera-themed novel is available on Amazon and best searched under the name of the author.

Modeled on Honoré de Balzac's Old Goriot (Le Père Goriot), Just Off Grand takes place in and around New York City between the final days of World War II and the end of 1945. Our hero is an ambitious young cantor aspiring to a career in opera. Tracking his progress from a “Borscht Belt” hotel to a dramatic Yom Kippur Eve service in a prosperous West Side synagogue, the novel also stages a riotous dress rehearsal at the Metropolitan Opera. The often conflicted, sometimes destructive interplay among the characters mirrors the ferment of post-War society.

 

Hilde Gueden (1917-1988), Viennese born, was a charter member of the fabled post-War Vienna State Opera Mozart ensemble. The soprano went on to a versatile career on international stages and recording studios. She made her mark in Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’amore and Don Pasquale, in Verdi’s Rigoletto, Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier and Arabella (as Zdenka), and in her peerless Musetta (Puccini, La Bohème). A lively actress, she nevertheless avoided the perkiness so irritating in the conventional demeanor of soubrettes.

Our remembrance of Hilde Gueden begins with Susanna’s seductive fourth act aria, “Deh vieni, non tardar (Oh, come, do not delay)” from Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro. The clip we have chosen is drawn from a 1964 Paris TV concert led by Lorin Maazel. Conductor and soprano move forthrightly through a piece that often suffers from excessive languor and fussy phrasing.

 

One cornerstone of Gueden’s repertoire was operetta. Two leading conductors, Clemens Krauss and Herbert von Karajan, called on her for Rosalinde in their complete recordings of Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus. In the 1950 Krauss version, she brings out the character’s longing for her Hungarian homeland in the Lassan, the slow first section, and then revels in the rapid articulation and joy of the second part, the Friska.

 

 Gueden made her 1951 Met debut as Gilda, the role she sang most often in her nine seasons with the company. The excerpt comes from a 1954 commercial recording of the complete opera conducted by Alberto Erede. Here she delivers “Caro nome” with the rare combination of warmth and glitter.

 

 In acknowledgement of her star status, the Met cast Gueden as Anne Trulove, the female lead in the prestigious North American premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress. Early New York reviewers had reservations about the composer’s neo-Classical score. But at the first performance on Broadway and 39^th Street in February 1953, at which I was present, there was immediate and enormous enthusiasm for Anne’s Act I aria, “No Word from Tom,” its cabaletta, “I Go, I Go to Him” ending with a prolonged, triumphant high C. As you will hear, in the original cast recording conducted by Stravinsky himself, Gueden duplicates the high C she sang at the Met.

  

Hilde Gueden’s superb Sophie, Zdenka, and Daphne, roles in the operas of Rlchard Strauss, can be found on YouTube, as can her renditions of the Contessa (Le Nozze di Figaro) and Violetta (Verdi, La Traviata), parts that she took on as her voice matured.