Wagner's Last Golden Age at the Met: I, The Dramatic Soprano

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In April and May 2019 the Met will revive Robert Lepage’s clunky and famously derided production of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle. Wagnerites avid for this monumental music-drama have every reason to look forward to Christine Goerke in the lynch-pin role of Brünnhilde. And yet, despite this return of the tetralogy, compared with past eras, the Wagner fare remains sparse. The opening decade of the 21^st century saw an average of fewer than three works by Wagner per season; in each of the four seasons ending with 2017-2018, audiences had to be content with only one. The golden age of Wagner at the Metropolitan is long past.

A golden age of any slice of the repertoire is dependent on the profusion of gifted voices suited to the style and to the commitment of management to their frequent display: at the Met, French opera in the “Gilded Age,” bel canto since the 1961 debut of Joan Sutherland Slavic opera for nearly two decades beginning in 1990. The Met’s dedication to Wagner between 1932 and 1950 was astonishing. In this period, a minimum of seven Wagner operas were programmed most seasons. A Wagnerite could often count on at least one “Ring” cycle, an Easter Parsifal, and Lohengrin, Tannhäuser, Tristan und Isolde, and Meistersinger, a bounty greater than that offered pilgrims to Bayreuth in any given summer. And essential to the profusion of performances, the Met could call upon a deep cadre of singers capable of meeting the gold standard with consistency. At the close of the 1940s, and given inevitable departures, a fabulous Wagnerian era came to an end, ceding center stage to Mozart, Verdi, and Puccini. In a series of posts devoted to specific voice types, we will evoke a remarkable epoch when Wagner ruled at the Met. We begin with the Hoch dramatischer, the dramatic soprano entrusted with Brünnhilde and Isolde.

It all began with the demise of the Chicago Civic Opera. A victim of the Great Depression, the prestigious company released its roster of stars in 1932. Chicago’s loss was New York’s gain. Frida Leider, acknowledged as the foremost Wagnerian dramatic soprano of the day, came to the Met. Here she sings the last minutes of the “Ring,” Brünnhilde’s Immolation Scene, in a 1927 Berlin recording, conducted by Leo Blech. Exceptional are the warmth of Leider’s timbre, the precision of her attacks (fearless at the top of her range), and her moving reading of the text, the climax of Wagner’s fifteen-hour-long narrative.

 

Leider’s presence in the Met’s Wagnerian Valhalla was alas short-lived, a mere twenty-eight performances in two seasons. In 1934 the company engaged Kirsten Flagstad, a Norwegian Hoch dramatisch. Some twenty-two years into a career almost exclusively confined to Scandinavia, she was nearly unknown on the international circuit. Her sensational debut was the beginning of her reign as the most prodigious Wagner soprano of her generation, indeed of the 20^th century. Her extensive discography offers an embarrassment of riches. We have chosen the “Liebestod” of her iconic Isolde in a live 1939 performance at the San Francisco opera.

Flagstad’s voice is perfectly placed over its full range, caressing a pianissimo, thrilling at fortissimo, at one with the orchestral texture, yet never submerged by Wagner’s massive sound. Unusual with a timbre so refulgent is such crystalline diction and such precise intonation.

Flagstad sang an average of thirty-five times per season between 1935 and 1941. As if this extraordinary commitment were not enough, the Australian Marjorie Lawrence, a diva in her own right, was there for additional Wagner performances. Here is Lawrence’s Brünnhilde, as she pleads for mercy from her father Wotan at the end of Die Walküre. The 1933 recording, made in Paris where Lawrence first became known to the opera world, is in French.

In 1940-1941, the Met had three first-rank Hoch drammatisher sopranos under contract, Flagstad, Lawrence, and a new American, Helen Traubel. In 1941-1942, two of the three were no longer on the roster, Flagstad having returned to Norway, now occupied by the Nazis, Lawrence having succumbed to polio. Traubel and the very young Swedish-American Astrid Varnay shouldered the Wagner repertoire for the remainder of the decade.

We hear Traubel’s creamy timbre and effortless emission in a 1946 recording of Elsa’s “traum (dream),” “Einsam in trüben Tagen (Lonely, in troubled days).” She is accompanied in this excerpt from Lohengrin by the New York Philharmonic conducted by Artur Rodzinski.

Astrid Varnay’s Met debut at twenty-three, with no previous operatic stage experience, came as a last-minute replacement in a December 1941 broadcast of Die Walküre. Varnay’s rapturously received Sieglinde shone in a cast that featured a constellation of Wagnerian luminaries: Traubel in her role debut as Brünnhilde, Lauritz Melchior, Friedrich Schorr, Kerstin Thorborg, and Alexander Kipnis. In the first fifteen years of Varnay’s Met career (she returned in 1974 for dramatic mezzo roles) Varnay sang fourteen of Wagner’s leads, a total far in excess of Flagstad’s or Traubel’s. We hear Varnay in a live transmission from Bayreuth dated 1951, the year of the first post-war Wagner festival. Conducted by Herbert von Karajan, her Brünnhilde in the final scene of Siegfried captures the unique density of her voice as she negotiates both lyric and heroic passages. And then there is her secure and blazing high C, stunning in a voice as dark as Varnay’s.

We should add that the performances of Traubel and Varnay were led by a cluster of legendary conductors: George Szell, Sir Thomas Beecham, Fritz Busch, and Fritz Reiner.

Please look for our next post, “Wagner’s Last Golden Age at the Met: 2. The Heroic Tenor.” 

World War II and the Met Roster. Americanization: 1. Astrid Varnay

The first set of posts in this series was devoted to Tiana Lemnitz, Germaine Lubin, and Ebe Stignani who, although contracted by the Met in the years before the United States entered World War II, would not or could not come. That opportunity lost, there would not be another, and the Met stage would never see three of the thrilling singers of the time. For differing reasons, and not surprisingly, many other artists would be absent during the years of conflict. There were the decrees of the Italian and German dictatorships, of course, and the endless contingencies of war. There were personal considerations as well, the most famous of which was Kirsten Flagstad’s decision to return to Norway in 1941 so as to be by her husband’s side during the occupation of her homeland--thereby depriving the Met of its star soprano. The Swedish Wagnerian tenor Set Svanholm’s debut, scheduled for that year, was delayed until 1946; he was unable to book a clipper reservation and refused to make the dangerous ocean voyage. And there was Ettore Panizza who, uninterruptedly since 1934, had been principal conductor of the Met’s Italian repertoire. In June 1942, he canceled his 1942-43 appearances for fear of wartime travel.

All this left Edward Johnson, the Met general manager from 1935 to 1950, in the precarious position of having to cast productions without the European singers on whom the Metropolitan had relied since its inception in 1883. The Americanization of the company that had, from the beginning, been axiomatic to the Canadian-born Johnson’s regime as a matter of principle, by 1939 had become a matter of necessity. In May 1942, he told the Metropolitan board, “The day is gone for an operatic manager to have any such surprise as the withdrawal of so many performers who had been contracted in store.  His function is undergoing an inevitable transition from the purveyance of established foreign success to  the discovery and development of native talent.” The company’s future would depend on a gifted and well-trained cadre of national singers. Two years later, with “reconversion … in the air,” Johnson wrote that the curtain would rise on “what is predominantly an American opera company.” That fall, “nearly two-thirds of the singing personnel [had] been actually born in this country.” America would soon move from “importer of talent” to “producer of talent” and ultimately to “exporter of talent” (Times, Nov. 26, 1944). Johnson had gotten ahead of himself. In the Met of the 1940s, new American stars, however lustrous, were insufficiently numerous to compensate for the European absentees. Among those pressed into service were Regina Resnik, the subject of the next post, and Astrid Varnay.

Born in Sweden to Hungarian opera singers, Varnay was brought to New York as a small child. She made her Met debut at age twenty-three on December 6, 1941, the day before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Varnay, who had been trained in New York, had never before appeared as a professional on any stage. Stepping in for the indisposed Lotte Lehmann, in Lehmann’s signature role, Sieglinde, the young soprano was cast opposite none other than the world’s premier heldentenor, Lauritz Melchior. Fortuitously for us, and accessible on Youtube, this event fell on a Saturday matinee. The transcription of the broadcast documents the performance not of an inexperienced tyro but of a compelling interpreter of the role. The Times reviewer noted a voice of “innate beauty” and warned the company against impairing its quality by casting Varnay in such heavy parts. But, absent the Met’s leading Wagnerians Australian Marjorie Lawrence (felled by polio) and Flagstad, Varnay was immediately called upon to share roles with the American Helen Traubel.

There is no doubt that early years of hard use took the bloom off Varnay’s voice; in compensation, she developed a sumptuous instrument, capable of surmounting the most brazen orchestral surges, and a personality made to the heroic measure of Brünnhilde, Isolde, and Elektra. Those who predicted that her career would be curtailed by the overparting to which she was subjected in her early twenties were proved wrong. She sang leading dramatic soprano roles for three decades, first at the Metropolitan, then in Europe’s major houses, before taking on the mezzo repertoire for another twenty-five years.

Here is Varnay in a 1949 New York Philharmonic broadcast from Carnegie Hall. Tireless in meeting the daunting demands of Strauss, with mounting excitement and deep reserves of tone, she traces the arc of Elektra’s nine-minute-long opening monologue: her despair and loneliness, the grizzly recital of the death of her father, Agamemnon, murdered in his bath by his wife and her lover, the bloody revenge Elektra and her brother will wreak on the assassins, the sacrifice of horses and hounds, the siblings’ triumphal dance. When Varnay sang the role at the Met in 1952, she was hailed for her “musical accuracy, total propulsion, and continuing freshness of sound so rare in this part as to be almost unheard of.”

Varnay’s career as a Met soprano ended in 1956. (She returned as a principal mezzo between 1974 and 1979.) During her soprano period, Wagner accounted for most of her activity, followed by Strauss. She did, however, sing a few performances of Cavalleria rusticana and Simon Boccanegra; the latter, in spring 1950, was an important and well received revival of Verdi’s opera. Varnay and Leonard Warren, another star member of the Met’s Americanization project, made a commercial recording of the Amelia-Boccanegra recognition scene. A lyric sorpano’s float above the staff is not encompassed by Varnay’s dark instrument anchored in the middle register. Nonetheless, her Amelia comes alive through incisive phrasing and scrupulous musicianship and validates her partnership with Warren, the compleat Verdi baritone.