Kirsten Flagstad was the leading Wagnerian soprano of her time. After her debut at the Metropolitan Opera in 1935, the Herald Tribune wrote that she “… restored old tradition and created a new one, [showing that] consummate musicianship and the utmost beauty of delivered song are not alien to dramatic truth but its deepest source and most perfect instrument.” Although war and personal tragedy were to keep her from the American operatic stage for nearly a decade, her legacy lives on in countless recordings. Flagstad was born in Oslo, Norway, on July 12, 1895. Her father was a professional conductor and her mother was a choral coach and pianist. She sang from earliest childhood, first learning the songs of Schubert, and by age ten had memorised the role of Elsa in Wagner’s Lohengrin. As a young girl, however, Flagstad never intended to become a professional musician: her real goal was to become a doctor. While at university, severe headaches and nosebleeds forced her to miss a year and she was unable to catch up with her classes. For this reason, she terminated her medical studies and devoted herself to music, entering the National Conservatory in Oslo to study accompanying. While at the conservatory, she made her operatic debut in a college production in 1913. She received a loan to study with Gilles Bratt in Stockholm. During this time the number of roles that she sang professionally increased—these included Nedda in Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci.
Soon after marrying Sigurd Hall, in 1919, Flagstad got pregnant, which forced her into an early retirement. However, she was away from the stage only temporarily, and by 1928 Flagstad was singing the dramatic soprano role of Agathe in Der Freischutz, by Carl Maria von Weber, at the Stora theatre in Göteborg. Flagstad sang her first Wagnerian role, Elsa in Lohengrin, with the Norwegian Opera Association in 1929. In 1932, for the first time, she performed Isolde in Tristan und Isolde in Oslo, and the next year made her first appearance at the Bayreuth Festival, the shrine of Wagnerian music in Germany. On February 2, 1935, she made her long-awaited debut at the Metropolitan Opera in New York as Sieglinde in Götterdámmerung, part of Wagner’s The Ring. Another performance as Isolde followed a few days later. That same year, she again appeared in The Ring. this time in the role of Brünnhilde. By this time, Flagstad was being hailed as the world’s foremost Wagnerian singer.
In 1938, Flagstad divorced Hall and married Henry Johansen, a Norwegian businessman. In 1940, Germany attacked Norway, and in 1941 Flagstad returned home but performed rarely during the war years. In 1945, after the liberation of Norway, the Norwegians arrested Johansen, accusing him of war profiteering. He died the following year while awaiting trial. Although Flagstad enjoyed the support of many in the American musical community, protests by war veterans’ groups and Norwegian organisations kept her from the operatic stage until 1949, when she sang at the Lyric Opera in Chicago.
She was at last invited back to the Metropolitan by Sir Rudolf Bing in 1950, her voice well preserved by years of rest. However, her return, although critically praised, was short-lived. She announced her retirement from the stage in 1951 and gave her farewell performance at the Metropolitan in 1952. In the years leading up to her death in 1962, she recorded some of her finest roles, and a few new ones. Her vocal qualities, particularly her performances of Wagner’s Isolde and Brünnhilde, remain unequalled.
Jane Prendergast
SEE ALSO:
OPERA.
FURTHER READING
McArthur, Edwin. Flagstad: A Personal Memoir (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965);
Vogt, Howard. Flagstad: Singer of the Century (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1987).
SUGGESTED LISTENING
Mahler: Kindertotenlieder-,
Sibelius: Kirsten Flagstad Edition, Vols. 1 and 2;
Wagner: Tristan und Isolde.