Word: nordicas
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...Madame Nordica, If Possible." On his 21st birthday J.D.R. Jr. got a gift of $21 from his father, a warm note about "your promise and . . . the confidence your life inspires." But now for the first time in his life J.D.R. Jr. was already beginning to explore the meanings of warmer words than confidence. Awkwardly, at the age of 20, he had learned how to dance. "I made up my mind that I had to conquer my shyness. I had to get a measure of social ease," he wrote home to his mother, who frowned on dancing. He began calling upon...
...wings, avoided visitors. Traubel opened the door of her dingy little dressing room to anyone who could crowd inside. Her laughter boomed so lustily that stage managers feared it could be heard in the auditorium. In the old horse-&-buggy era, Wagnerian divas like Johanna Gadski and Lillian Nordica had expected even the stagehands to wait on them. Traubel insists on putting on her own makeup, wig and costumes, because "being dependent is a luxury you shouldn't allow yourself...
Enrico Caruso remained a highly informal character. Once when Lillian Nordica was about to lift her voice in a love duet with him, he deposited a hot potato in her hand. In Tosca, when Antonio Scotti stooped to pick up the paint brush beneath Cavaradossi's easel, he had to yank at it for minutes-Caruso had nailed it to the floor. Caruso's most celebrated peccadillo led to his arrest on the complaint of a Mrs. Hannah Graham who had run into him at the Central Park Zoo and testified breathlessly: "He insulted me. He brushed against...
Since the late great Lillian Nordica's gaslit heyday (1890-1910) U.S. woman's weight has dwindled. One result : a scarcity of great U.S. Wagnerian sopranos. Today few U.S. women singers have the beef and brawn that helped Nordica and her famous U.S. contemporaries (Olive Fremstad,* Emma Eames, etc.) to shout down batteries of Wagnerian trumpets and trombones...
...Helen Traubel is far & away the finest U.S. Wagnerian soprano of her generation, and one of the three or four finest in the world. Last week, as the Metropolitan's annual Wagner cycle came to an end, Traubel could claim an added distinction: no other U.S. soprano since Nordica had sung the three-volume role of Brünnhilde (Walküre, Siegfried, Götterdämmerung) right through in successive performances...