Frieda Hempel

Note by John Steane











In a melancholy survey of the 1941 deletions list, Compton Mackenzie as Editor of The Gramophone magazine deplored the war currently being waged against HMV's Historical Catalogue. Carusos, Battistinis, Melbas, all the treasury of a richly endowed age, were gone with a stroke of the pen. Tetrazzini, Renaud, Plançon... and here he came to a name that made him pause in reminiscence. Frieda Hempel: 'One of the most enchanting vocal discs ever issued was her singing of a Swedish folk-song called 'When I was seventeen'.' Not that that particular record fell along with the immediate victims, for as a single-sided disc made in 1916 it had disappeared long ago. But here were Hempel's Traviata and Rigoletto, her Mozart and Rossini, in fact almost all that had survived the previous cuts, now gone: typical of the gramophone's museum, abolished just at the time when the industry had acquired sufficient maturity to have a history too. Reverting to Hempel in the following year, when the few remains of her recorded art were swept away with the rest, he admonished his readers with the observation that 'if she is not represented in a collection, the gap is a serious one'.

Collectors who turned to older catalogues to find how she fared when in her full glory would also refer to the Biographical Section where a photograph, very period in style, showed the diva looking soulful in her Traviata costume, with pearls and a sort of tiara as adornments. They might also have noted that she was born in 1885, which made her, after all, not quite so old and 'historical' as the records themselves would suggest. She was in fact only three years older than, say, Lotte Lehmann and Elisabeth Schumann, both of whom were at that time still very active in the musical world and would be considered singers of the present rather than of the past. Hempel herself (the reader would learn) had made 'a welcome reappearance in London in October 1935 after some ten years absence from the metropolis'. So she too, despite her place in the Historic Catalogue, was still, more or less, in business.

The explanation is that her operatic career was a particularly glamorous one and that it ended betimes. The glamour fell like stardust upon her young shoulders first in 1905, when from the German provinces she was recalled to Berlin at the request of the Kaiser. London heard her in 1907, and in 1912 she joined the Metropolitan, New York, as their leading coloratura soprano in what was still very much the age of Caruso. She left the Metropolitan in 1919, a year before the great tenor was himself to be heard there for the last time. So these vital dates in her curriculum vitae place her as a singer most closely associated with opera in the first decades of the century. In recording terms she belongs to the pre-electrical era, for although she made a few electrical records (one of which is included here) they remained unpublished, and essentially her recording career ended with the arrival of the new process in 1925. By that time she had already retired from opera, her last performances being given in 1921 with the Chicago Company in San Francisco.

She continued to sing in concerts for many years after that, and adopted as her rather curious speciality the programmes of the famous nineteenth-century soprano Jenny Lind. It began with a centenary celebration in 1920. Hempel was chosen by the Swedish promoters of the event and she was to appear in a costume as near as possible to that worn by the Swedish nightingale on her New York debut in 1850. A period piano was used, the accompanist donning appropriate costume, and when it came to the celebrated 'Echo Song' Hempel seated herself at the piano and played and sang in the way Jenny Lind was understood to have done. It was a great success, though when she repeated it, and especially when she brought the 'Jenny Lind Evening' over to London, there were those who intimated that, while they were very happy to greet Miss Hempel at any time, they would rather welcome her as herself than as somebody else however illustrious.

With the end of her operatic career, she had less need to call upon the high notes which had been so essential to her success in the coloratura repertoire. By 1930, the critic of The New York Times, present at her Carnegie Hall recital, found that 'in the upper reaches of the scale... the former luscious quality is no longer present; but the middle voice has still the suave and shining brilliance and the mellow resonance remembered of old'. By 1939 the limitations were more apparent, but the critic could also note a growth of interpretative artistry: 'Few singers are left today with her imagination, unerring sense of style and ability to bring home to an audience the particular mood and meaning of a given song'. In 1946, still in New York, it had to be admitted that 'the sum total of her singing was disappointing', yet the 'impeccable phrasing, highly perfected legato and clear-cut diction' were fine as ever, and the voice itself, though edgy and wanting colour in what was left of the upper register, was 'still voluminous, steady and true to pitch'. In her autobiography she gives 1951 as the year of her last public performances, and the book itself (Mein Leben dem Gesang) has as its sad postscript the news of her death in Berlin on 7 October 1955, a few months after her seventieth birthday.

Hempel was an unusually versatile singer. In the years of her vocal prime she was admired especially for the grace and skill of her work in the coloratura roles. Her career began with Frau Fluth in Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor and the Queen in Les Huguenots, both of them formidable in their demands upon the technique. Lucia, Rosina, Marie (in La fille du Régiment), Gilda and Violetta were among the parts she sang in the Berlin years. The lighter lyric roles, such as Mignon, Micaëla and Mimě, were hers too, and she soon took her place among the best Mozart singers of the age. Susanna, Constanze, Fiordiligi, Donna Elvira and the Queen of the Night were prominent in her operatic repertoire, while in recitals she would often include a group of Mozart's songs with perhaps arias such as 'Zeffiretti lusinghieri', 'Voi che sapete' and, in early years, a highly praised 'Non mi dir'. Then, more surprisingly, there were excursions into Wagner. Early in her career she sang as first Flower Maiden in Parsifal at Bayreuth, and she became an admirable Elsa in Lohengrin and Eva in Die Meistersinger. The latter was one of the roles she sang under Toscanini at the Met; another (and a strenuous undertaking too) was Weber's Euryanthe. In addition to all this, her place in the history books will probably be assured by her connection with Richard Strauss. It was apparently with her voice in mind that he wrote the outrageously difficult coloratura music for Zerbinetta in Ariadne auf Naxos, and when, because of her contract with the Metropolitan, she was unable to sing in the 1912 premiere he had to modify it to suit even so expert a technician as Margarethe Siems. Siems, who had been the original Marschallin in 1911, also sang that role in the London premiere, relinquishing it to Hempel for the last performance in a revival during Beecham's Drury Lane season of 1914, by which time she had introduced the greatly loved character to New York audiences at the Met.

Of this, the great variety and scope of her work, records give only a partial glimpse. Yet the beauty of her voice is unmistakable, as is the brilliance of her coloratura. That she could be touchingly intimate is shown clearly in her Rigoletto duet with Pasquale Amato, a colleague in many performances at the Metropolitan. Her individuality and charm are evident in the Barbiere di Siviglia aria, and in the Ernani solo there is more than a hint of that voluminous, mellow quality which the critic noted in her recitals of the 1930s and even later. She was a remarkable singer, and we are fortunate that that 'serious gap' on the shelves, so worrisome to The Gramophone's first Editor, can now be filled.


© 1993 John Steane

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