Word: flagstad
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...eleven hours before the box office opened, hopeful standees began queueing up outside the Metropolitan Opera House. Minutes before curtain time, even habitual latecomers were settled in their boxes and reserved seats. The high spot of the music week in Manhattan was Soprano Kirsten Flagstad's farewell...
There were five curtain calls after Alcestis' first act, five more after the second. At the opera's end, the rest of the cast got their due (two curtain calls). Then the audience stood as one man and gave Soprano Flagstad ten more. On the tenth, the Met's gold curtains parted behind her to reveal Met officials and the whole cast lined up on the stage, applauding. A ticker tape of torn programs flaked from the balconies; from boxes nearest the stage, fans threw roses at her feet...
Said Met Board Chairman George A. Sloan: "Tonight we are overwhelmed by the realization that we have seen you and heard you on this stage for the last time . . ." Cries of "No, no" went up. Sloan reeled off Flagstad's greatest roles from a commemorative silver cup: "Isolde . . . Briinnhilde . . . Elsa . . . Kundry . . . Fidelio . . . Alcestis...
...pink-cheeked Kirsten Flagstad, a simple woman who says, "Always I wanted to be a private person," has had her fill. She has been singing opera for nearly 40 years. For nearly 20 of those years she has been the world's foremost Wagnerian soprano. She had postponed her retirement and capped her career by learning the role of Alcestis in English at 55. Now she was leaving the Met, after her 193rd performance, with a voice faintly fading but still incomparable for ringing power and eloquence...
...Flagstad was not quite out to pasture yet. At week's end she sang a concert in Houston, and she is scheduled for two more, in Chicago and Springfield, Mass. Though she wants to return to her native Norway, she plans to give occasional concerts in Europe because "I need to go into retirement gradually...