Recovering the Forgotten Singer, 5: Helen Traubel

When Helen Traubel (1899-1972) debuted at the Met in 1937, the company had the extraordinary luxury of alternating the stellar Brünnhildes of Kirsten Flagstad and Marjorie Lawrence. Traubel’s operatic stage debut, at nearly forty years of age, was in the Met premiere of a short-lived English-language opera by Walter Damrosch, The Man Without a Country; two years went by before she was assigned a Wagner lead, Sieglinde in Die Walküre. And it was not until 1941, when Flagstad returned to her native Norway for the duration of the war and Lawrence was felled by polio that Traubel became the company’s leading hochdramatischer soprano.

Two decades as a concert artist had honed Traubel’s voice, voluminous, equalized from top to bottom, encompassing both lyric and heroic passages with no loss of timbral purity and clear diction.

Aside from four performances in the Damrosch opera and a late turn as Der Rosenkavalier’s Marschallin, Traubel’s 176 Met appearances, over seventeen consecutive seasons, were devoted exclusively to Wagner. Senta, in Der Fliegende Holländer, was the sole heroic soprano role in the Wagner canon that she did not undertake. Only Johanna Gadski, in the early 20^th century, sang more Walküre Brünnhildes than Traubel who, herself, is second only to Flagstad in the lineage of the company’s Isoldes.

Here, in a 1950 commercial recording, the soprano sings both parts in Walküre’s triumphant scene in which Brünnhilde bestows Siegmund’s broken sword on Sieglinde, the future mother of the hero, Siegfried.

Traubel’s effulgent “Liebestod” comes from a 1945 recording with the New York Philharmonic led by Artur Rodzinski.

 

By the start of Rudolf Bing’s tenure as general manager of the Met in 1950, Traubel was nearing the end of her reign over the Valhalla of Wagnerians. Her top register receding, she appeared more and more as a cross-over artist in cabarets, and on television with the likes of comedian Jimmy Durante. Bing, publicly disapproving of her excursion into pop culture, terminated her contract in 1953. She soon starred in Pipe Dream (1955), one of the few failures of musical theatre luminaries Rodgers and Hammerstein, and had featured roles in movies with José Ferrer and Jerry Lewis.

Our final track is from Deep in My Heart, a 1954 biopic loosely based on the life of operetta composer Sigmund Romberg. Ferrer and Merle Oberon are prominent in the clip. Traubel does justice to an old song, “Auf Wiedersehen.”

The soprano’s other extra-musical interests included part ownership of a St. Louis major league baseball team and authorship of two mystery novels.

Met audiences have heard brilliant Brünnhildes and Isoldes since 1953—Birgit Nilsson, Hildegard Behrens, Gwyneth Jones immediately come to mind—but none, in our view, with the rich, warm sound of Helen Traubel at her peak.