Word: fremstad
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When Kirsten Flagstad in 1935 made her Metropolitan Opera debut in Wagner's Die Walkuere, the audience cheered and the press groped for comparisons with "the irrecoverable magic" of Swedish-born Soprano Olive Fremstad.* Last week another Swedish Wagnerian soprano strode the Met's stage, and this time the comparison was to the "incomparable" Flagstad herself. The debutante: 41-year-old Birgit Nilsson, whose appearance in a new production of Tristan und Isolde touched off the kind of debut furor the Met's Wagnerians have not witnessed in a quarter-century...
...Next to last: eightyish Olive Fremstad, who died last year in Irvington-on-Hudson...
Died. Olive Fremstad, eightyish, old-time Wagnerian soprano, one of the last of the hefty, histrionic divas of the Metropolitan Opera's early-century "Golden Age"; in Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y. In Minnesota, where her father emigrated from Norway and set up as a Methodist lay preacher, she played the organ at his revival meetings, worked her way to Manhattan stardom, made a million, at her farewell appearance in 1914 (as Elsa in Lohengrin) took 40 curtain calls...
...heard the power, brilliance and detail of Strauss's music as they had seldom heard it before. Onstage, they saw an incandescently evil Salome, flashing in green, purple and red, who commanded the performance from beginning to end. Soprano Welitsch had critics reaching back for comparisons to Olive Fremstad, who sang (but did not dance) the U.S. premiere of Salome in 1907. And she carried the rest of the cast into the spirit of the thing with her: even though some of his voice has gone to Valhalla, Wagnerian Tenor Max Lorenz couldn't have been more convincing...
...Though she was born in Sweden, Minnesota-raised Soprano Fremstad made her reputation as a Wagnerian singer entirely...