Word: br
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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During the 26 years that Richard Wagner brooded over The Ring of the Nibelung, no one character caused him greater anguish than his heroine Brünnhilde. Time & again he flung down his pen and paced the floor. He recalled in his autobiography that once "my courage failed me completely, for I could not help asking myself whether the singer had yet been born who was capable of vitalizing this heroic female figure."* The stiffest test in all grand opera is the Brünnhilde of Götterdämmerung. That rôle made big news in Manhattan...
...Walküre Brünnhilde is a high-spirited amazon, a goddess sired and loved by Wotan who punishes her by making her mortal and banishing her to a rock surrounded by fire. In Siegfried the perfect hero penetrates the flames and Brünnhilde is a woman radiantly in love. In Götterdämmerung the emotional range is so extended that few singers have been able to compass it successfully. In the first act a great Brünnhilde must be tender, exuberantly happy. In the second act bewilderment turns to blazing rage. Under the spell...
Stiffer tests will come when Madame Flagstad sings Isolde and Brünnhilde, the big heroic roles for which she was chiefly imported. But she is approaching the ordeal with rare calm and self-possession. Back stage she knits constantly, "just like your President's wife." As Mrs. Henry Johansen, wife of a wealthy lumber merchant, her Metropolitan earnings mean little to her. "If I am a big success," she said last week, "I shall come back next year. Otherwise I stay in Norway...
...Metropolitan Opera Company engaged a strapping Austrian soprano named Anny Konetzni to sing heroic Wagnerian roles. Anny Konetzni had been a swimming champion and a contralto, before she went up in the scale. For her debut performance last week she donned the feathers and breastplate of the Walkure Brünnhilde, proved herself a routine interpreter with a big pleasant voice which she had trouble controlling...
Newsmen who queried the Brünnhilde on her swimming achievements found her English uncertain. She claims to have swum the Danube seven miles through Vienna, says that since 1919 she has been "the backside champion of Austria...