Word: fremstad
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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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...