Word: br
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
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...
...first Brünnhilde was not easy to find, for most prima donnas impressed Wagner as being "silly, fastidious schoolgirls." He finally chose Amalie Materna, a big-chested Styrian with a grand manner and a zooming voice. At that first Bayreuth Festival in 1876 one of the Rhine maidens was a pretty young Jewess named Lilli Lehmann. Wagner wanted to adopt her but her mother, who knew the master well, objected. Lehmann was a light coloratura then and no one, least of all Wagner, suspected that she was soon to cultivate dramatic rôles and sing Brünnhilde...
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...
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...