Word: traubel
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Schumann: Frauenliebe und Leben (Lotte Lehmann, soprano, with Bruno Walter at the piano; Columbia; 8 sides). Grade B performance and recording; Helen Traubel's Victor version is still tops...
Bayreuth By-Passed. Though she sings her Brünnhildes and Isoldes like a veteran of Bayreuth, Helen Traubel has been outside the U.S. only twice in her life: on tours to Canada and Cuba. Her father ran a drugstore in St. Louis. Her mother, Clara Stuhr, was famous among the Midwest's German-American singing societies for her soprano. Traubel herself got an early reputation as the best belly-flopper among Forest Park's sledders, a massive destroyer of chocolate ice-cream sodas, and an almost maniacal fan of the St. Louis Cardinals. At 15, with...
...Walter Damrosch went to St. Louis to conduct an oldtime German Stinger fest and found Traubel scheduled as a soloist. He was so bowled over by her voice that he invited her to Manhattan, promptly wrote a part for her in his opera The Man without a Country. The opera 'was a flop, but Traubel stayed on in Manhattan, cooking her own meals, mending her own clothes, plugging away patiently at her vocal studies. Two years later she managed to scrape up the cash for a Town Hall debut and critics made such a fuss that the Metropolitan added...
Baseball Banned. Today Helen Traubel averages more than 60 concerts a year on tours throughout the U.S. Her homely Midwestern habits have changed but little. Indestructibly good-natured, she has never been known to have a fit of temperament. Baseball has been forbidden her, because she always yells herself hoarse. But she goes to rip-roaring Western movies and listens to the Lone Ranger on the radio. Her husband is a onetime stockbroker, now her personal manager...
...Helen Traubel discusses her operatic exploits with a great bellowing laugh, claims she works off as many pounds during a Wagnerian performance as a Yale quarterback in the Harvard game. "Dieting is all right for those little coloratura sopranos," says she, "but not for me. You've got to have plenty of stuffing to sing Wagner...