Word: tterd
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...most amazing accomplishments were the Brünnhildes in Die Walkiire and Götterdämmerung, the Kundry in Parsifal, roles she had never sung before. Only for these last two did she have the benefit of stage and orchestra rehearsals. But no one could have guessed it. To her colleagues she scarcely seemed human until the final Parsifal when she fell asleep on the stage, almost missed...
...recalled in his autobiography that once "my courage failed me completely, for I could not help asking myself whether the singer had yet been born who was capable of vitalizing this heroic female figure."* The stiffest test in all grand opera is the Brünnhilde of Götterdämmerung. That rôle made big news in Manhattan last week when it was sung for the first time by Soprano Kirsten Flagstad, the Metropolitan's new Norwegian import (TIME...
...high-spirited amazon, a goddess sired and loved by Wotan who punishes her by making her mortal and banishing her to a rock surrounded by fire. In Siegfried the perfect hero penetrates the flames and Brünnhilde is a woman radiantly in love. In Götterdämmerung the emotional range is so extended that few singers have been able to compass it successfully. In the first act a great Brünnhilde must be tender, exuberantly happy. In the second act bewilderment turns to blazing rage. Under the spell of one of Wagner's convenient potions...
What Lehmann accomplished with the rôle has long been legendary. She sang it in the first Götterdämmerung given in the U. S. in 1888 and therein set a standard which no other singer has ever quite achieved. Vocally she was a match for Wagner's mighty orchestra. Dramatically she was the "heroic female figure" that Wagner imagined. Those who heard her have never forgotten the horror in her voice when she turned on Siegfried, the fury she became when she swore the piercing oath on the spear...
...everyone groping for non-existent superlatives. Many a conservative New Yorker pronounced it the greatest concert within memory, credited its success not only to the little Italian conductor but also to Soprano Gertrude Kappel who majestically outdid herself as Brünnhilde in the Immolation scene from Götterdümmerung...