Kirsten Flagstad

Note by John Steane











Flagstad's is the career that might never have been. It looks so secure, spanning the middle decades of the century, firmly based on the unchallenged majesty of her voice, the utter reliability of her musicianship, her technical control and nobility of character. An overview shows the proportions to be right: careful training, a cautious start, growth of repertoire and experience at home, a trial venture abroad, then the international scene, a well-sustained period of triumph, an honoured retirement. Since her death, on December 7th 1962, scarcely a year has passed without reminders of her glory coming along in the form of newly reissued recordings, and as we approach the centenary of her birth on July 12th 1895 we can be sure that it will be celebrated wherever the great traditions of operatic singing are valued throughout the world. Yet it could all so easily not have happened.

She herself wanted to become a doctor. The household was a musical one, the father being first a violinist and later conductor at the Central Theatre in Oslo, and the mother acting as pianist and repetiteur. Kirsten, like the other children, played the piano (hating her compulsory hour's practice daily) and she also sang, in private and later at parties. But her career at this stage was to be in medicine, and it was only when she became ill after trying to cram three years' work into two that she began to think at all seriously about singing. That was the first turn of Fortune.

The second was when the money ran out. A promising debut as the boy Nuri in d'Albert's Tiefland at Oslo in 1913 led to more work, some of which attracted the attention of a private enthusiast whose generosity enabled the young Flagstad to study in Stockholm. When she had no more money and no work either, she prepared to come home. But another kind helper appeared as by magic, and so the career advanced a stage further. She herself believed that the decisive turning-point came a little later, in 1919, when she was temptingly offered a contract as leading-lady in operetta: of course that too might have led eventually to Bayreuth and the Metropolitan, but it seems unlikely. Anyway, she refused.

'I am an opera singer', she had declared, and that seemed to settle it. For the next ten years she was a valued, hard-working company-artist, who would sing more or less whatever was asked of her, and who never put a foot wrong. Nedda in She was away from the stage for several months, but finding that her husband rather liked being married to an opera-singer and that the management were clamouring for her return, she went back. Handel's Rodelinda was the temptation here, and, showing how far she was inwardly from retirement, she began to study Isolde. The first performance (her first Tristan und Isolde So all followed from there. The Metropolitan offered an audition, though it appears they had no real idea of what it was they had engaged. No advance publicity, just an ordinary mid-season debut in February 1935: that was the schedule. But there were enough people present at that matinée, and enough people listening to the broadcast, for it to become common knowledge that this Sieglinde was special. Die Walküre was followed a few days later by Tristan und Isolde, after which the cry went up: 'the voice of the century'. The Walküre and Götterdämmerung Brünnhilde then had to be learnt in no time at all, and when they too were heard there was no room left for doubt: in what New York's veteran critic W.J. Henderson had called 'an age of small things daily growing smaller', a golden-age singer had arrived.

For the next few years Flagstad was the supreme singer on the operatic stages of the world. This is so, for, although there were other fine artists, they were either just beyond their prime or not yet quite come into it, or they stood out less eminently and in a repertoire which at that time carried less than the grand prestige of the Wagnerian. She might well have retained that position without being disturbed for the next decade or so, had it not been for the Second World War. With herself in America and her husband in Norway, she sought to return. When eventually she succeeded, Norway was an occupied country and she had travelled across occupied Europe. Her husband was a prominent businessman, and when the peace came was charged with collaboration. Flagstad denied any such charge, and was convinced that both she and her husband had an enemy who persecuted both of them vindictively. Again the career might have ended. But her husband died, and pressures of many kinds, including the urge to fight back, brought about a return to the professional life. This was the decision which finally made the name of Flagstad what it is today, and it was a decision that might well have gone the other way.

She returned, first to Paris, then La Scala, Covent Garden, the Metropolitan. Miraculously her voice was invincible as ever, and her characterisation in the great roles of Brünnhilde and Isolde now went deeper. She added other roles, and finally, in unforgettable performances at the Mermaid Theatre in London, Purcell's Dido. Her song recitals brought a closer kind of contact with her audience, especially when, as usually happened in the second half of the programme, she turned to the songs of her native Scandinavia. If, after the devastation of war, any singer could symbolise the phoenix of rebirth, it was Flagstad. If ever there seemed a grand design behind a singer's career, it was hers too; for at so many stages it offered the security and satisfactions of the merely good, always to be rejected in favour of the fulfilment of greatness.


© 1993 John Steane

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