Word: varnay
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Just before a scheduled concert with the Dallas Symphony, Wagnerian Soprano Astrid Varnay got a phone call from the Metropolitan Opera in Manhattan. Soprano Helen Traubel was ill. Could Miss Varnay come to the rescue? Miss Varnay finished her concert and grabbed a plane, arrived at the Met at 6 p.m., rehearsed until the 7:30 curtain rose on Gotterddmmerung and her Met debut as Briinnhilde...
There were compensations. The Metropolitan's Soprano Astrid Varnay sang such a sumptuous Brünnhilde that she made up for her missing helmet. In Siegfried, the dragon Fafner, an immense 30-ft. creation, emerged from a gaping cave in front-center (instead of from a miserable little hole to one side, as at the conventional Met). Fafner was so terrible in his oversize plungings and snortings that, probably for the first time in history, Siegfried seemed really brave to tackle...
...remainder of the three-week season, Bayreuth will be pure Wagner, with a good many newcomers among the performers. Unlike Furtwängler, neither of the Wagner conductors, Hans Knappertsbusch and Herbert von Karajan, has ever held the festival podium before. Among the new singers: Met Soprano Astrid Varnay (Brünhilde) and U.S. Bass-Baritone George London (Amfortas in Parsifal), who has been a postwar star of the Vienna State Opera (TIME...
...session, Soprano Astrid Varnay offered to spend her free evenings baby-sitting and turn over the money to the Metropolitan Opera Fund. The idea, she said, "came to me in a flash." She even had a good word to say for her babysitting technique: "Treat them like grownups. I usually tell them little stories about my friends and things I have been doing...
Unfortunately, the film's continuity is almost as ragged as its moppets, and just as inclined to make too much of a good thing. But Director Robert Varnay knows how to cut loose a camera for comic effect, and the kids (Jacques Gencel,* Sophie Leclair, De Meulan, et al.) appear human and likable, never consciously cute, and seldom more precocious than a childhood on Montmartre streets might warrant...