Word: traubel
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Melchior-two singers with the bellows and brawn to shout down the batteries of trumpets and trombones that Wagner put to work in the pit. Since Flagstad went home to her quisling husband and semi-retirement in 1941, the Met's Wagnerian first team has been Melchior and Traubel...
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...
...Helen Traubel at 43 is a prima donna in technique but not in temperament. A hearty, buxom woman with auburn hair and green eyes, she is as relaxed as a double-jointed shortstop. According to her husband, she is so chronically good-natured that "no one is ever quite sure whether she is stupid or lethargic." She was born above her father's drugstore in the old German section of South St. Louis, and brought up in so deeply Germanic an environment that she still punctuates her conversations with...
...argued politics and were kept from quarreling by matriarchal Grossmama ("her strength lay in her gentleness"). At mealtimes, as many as 30 sat around Grossmama's huge table to eat her Sauerbraten, Hasenpjeffer, herring salad and Torten and Kaffee stollen. "We had a gemütlich upbringing," says Traubel. "Our theory was 'lucky is the person who is happy...
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...