Word: wagnerians
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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When Kirsten Flagstad in 1935 made her Metropolitan Opera debut in Wagner's Die Walkuere, the audience cheered and the press groped for comparisons with "the irrecoverable magic" of Swedish-born Soprano Olive Fremstad.* Last week another Swedish Wagnerian soprano strode the Met's stage, and this time the comparison was to the "incomparable" Flagstad herself. The debutante: 41-year-old Birgit Nilsson, whose appearance in a new production of Tristan und Isolde touched off the kind of debut furor the Met's Wagnerians have not witnessed in a quarter-century...
...displayed a big, flashing, vibrant voice that galvanized her audience and conveyed an immediate sense of the turbulent passions that animate the role. As the opera unfolded, Soprano Nilsson continued to dominate the stage with such ringing power that she cut without difficulty through the opulent textures of the Wagnerian orchestra-particularly in the climactic Liebestod in Act III. Perhaps because of debut stresses, the voice also had its marked drawbacks; at times it sounded strained, took on a steely glitter when more opulent warmth was called for. Apparently a more severe critic of herself than some of Manhattan...
...choirmaster started giving her vocal lessons, persuaded her to enter the Royal Academy of Music in Stockholm. Delayed by the war, she made her first real splash in 1947 with the Stockholm Opera singing Verdi's Lady Macbeth. Gradually she developed a repertory that now includes all the Wagnerian soprano parts, many of the great roles of Verdi, Puccini, Richard Strauss, plus an assortment of contemporary roles. Two and a half years ago (TIME, June 3, 1957), her Isolde at Florence's Maggio Musicale was one of the great Wagnerian performances of the decade...
...Kurt Blankmeyer, a piece called Saturday Burial, which describes the narrator's childhood experiences with a mad widow, and her dog Siegfried. The widow is a powerful Teuton transparently called Edda Norse, and the story has a conscious Germanic flavor and a fine not to say exciting Wagnerian ending. Saturday Burial is written in the same half-understanding, wide-eyed manner as Blankmeyer's Victory Over Japan, but less skillfully. The development is somewhat mechanical, and the events which should happen spontaneously seem to be plotted by an all-too-visible hand. Yet the story has its fascinating aspects...
With his firm jaw and conservative business suits, Robert Oliver, 36, is the picture of a successful executive. And so he is: boss of management development at California's missile-making Hughes-Aircraft Co. But when he talks, his voice is that of someone else: an oldtime Wagnerian "black bass," echoing with rare depth and timbre. Executive Oliver's voice is so unusual, in fact, that when Composer Igor Stravinsky first heard him, he added a specially low voice role to his last great work and asked Oliver to sing...