Word: singe
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Home-Grown Wagnerian. At first by default, and increasingly by merit, Helen Traubel has become the greatest Wagnerian soprano singing in the world today. She is the first great soprano at the Met to sing Wagner and nothing but (Flagstad sang Beethoven's Fidelia). She is also the first American-born Brünnhilde and Isolde who didn't study at the Wagnerian shrine at Bayreuth. Until 1940, when she sang in Canada, Helen Traubel had never been out of the U.S. She has never crossed the Atlantic...
...Down, Sing Down. Helen's mother, something of a local concert singer herself, sent 13-year-old Helen to a friend of her own childhood, Madame Vetta Karst, the most exacting voice teacher in St. Louis. A birdlike little woman with an uncontrollable temper, Madame Karst screeched and nagged, threw pillows at her pupils. One day Helen sobbed, "I can never satisfy you!" "When you can satisfy me you won't need me any more," snapped Madame Karst. She taught Traubel to sing "down" so her tones would go over; to drop her jaw as far as possible...
Nobody-least of all her teachers-could understand how that Traubel girl managed to get any education at all. Even the teachers assumed that Helen would be a singer; sometimes they'd ask for a song. Helen would sing Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland; if any boy groaned, "I'd bounce him on the head as I went by." When she got too far behind in her studies Father Otto hired a tutor, told her to "kindly stuff this little goose." Says Helen Traubel today: "I may be a numskull scholastically, but what I remember of my family...
Otto Traubel died before he could hear Helen sing Mendelssohn's Spring Song at her Wyman School commencement. (And Helen Traubel's mother died just three months before Helen's big Manhattan success...
...Slight Case of Ecstasy" ought to make the rounds of the dance bands despite their indigestible lyrics. Miss Segal's stage presence and ability to toss off lines shame the rest of the east, although she is given practically nothing clever to say and even less to sing. On a basis of personal attractiveness and or capacity to sing, dance, or be funny, J. Edward Bromberg, Warde Donavan, Alma Kaye, and Margaret Phelan seem highly unsuited to musical comedy. Towering Frank Marlowe's amusing facial expressions and amazing Falls put over a questionable production entitled "I wanna Go to City...