Word: astrid
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Just before a scheduled concert with the Dallas Symphony, Wagnerian Soprano Astrid Varnay got a phone call from the Metropolitan Opera in Manhattan. Soprano Helen Traubel was ill. Could Miss Varnay come to the rescue? Miss Varnay finished her concert and grabbed a plane, arrived at the Met at 6 p.m., rehearsed until the 7:30 curtain rose on Gotterddmmerung and her Met debut as Briinnhilde...
Died. Prince Oscar Carl Wilhelm of Sweden, 90, head of the Swedish Red Cross (1903-45), brother of Sweden's late King Gustaf V, uncle of King Gustaf VI, father of Norway's Princess Martha and of Belgium's late Queen Astrid (who died in an automobile smashup in 1935), grandfather of Belgium's King Baudouin; of a heart attack; in Stockholm...
There were compensations. The Metropolitan's Soprano Astrid Varnay sang such a sumptuous Brünnhilde that she made up for her missing helmet. In Siegfried, the dragon Fafner, an immense 30-ft. creation, emerged from a gaping cave in front-center (instead of from a miserable little hole to one side, as at the conventional Met). Fafner was so terrible in his oversize plungings and snortings that, probably for the first time in history, Siegfried seemed really brave to tackle...
...remainder of the three-week season, Bayreuth will be pure Wagner, with a good many newcomers among the performers. Unlike Furtwängler, neither of the Wagner conductors, Hans Knappertsbusch and Herbert von Karajan, has ever held the festival podium before. Among the new singers: Met Soprano Astrid Varnay (Brünhilde) and U.S. Bass-Baritone George London (Amfortas in Parsifal), who has been a postwar star of the Vienna State Opera (TIME...
...already! He is almost as big as a Premier!" When Baudouin was four, his grandfather Albert slipped on a mountain crag. The mourning bells for the beloved monarch were among the first impressions in the boy's mind. A year later, his mother, radiantly beautiful Queen Astrid, was killed in an automobile accident on a vacation in Switzerland (the King himself had been driving). Haggard with grief, Leopold returned to his country home at Stuyvenberg. His three children were playing on the lawn: Josephine-Charlotte careening down the paths on her bicycle, five-year-old Baudouin in panting pursuit...