ÍøÆغÚÁÏ

Helen Traubel emerged as a major talent when she shouldered most of the Wagnerian heroic soprano roles at the Metropolitan Opera when Kirsten Flagstad and other European-based singers became unavailable in the early 1940s. But her rise to fame was not predicated only on having an open field; her immense, vibrant, and warm-toned voice and thorough schooling would have made themselves known in even the most competitive circumstances. Traubel came to the Met almost reluctantly, having declined earlier offers; she waited until she felt herself completely prepared. Despite a shortness in the top-most register which caused her to duck her high Cs, she was an imposing artist, both physically and vocally. She retired from the Metropolitan and most other stage work only when Rudolf Bing, then the manager of the Metropolitan, objected to her appearing in nightclubs (thus following her frequent partner, Lauritz Melchior).

After long-term voice study with Louise Verta Karst in her native St. Louis, Traubel made her debut as soloist with the St. Louis Symphony in 1925. During the ensuing decade, she performed as a concert singer and recitalist, also appearing often in radio broadcasts. In 1937, Traubel was engaged for the role of Mary Rutledge in Walter Damrosch's The Man Without a Country during a second spring season at the Metropolitan Opera. Notwithstanding her inexperience on stage, she exhibited a lustrous, voluminous sound and considerable dramatic presence. The opera was not well-received, but Traubel's performance was warmly praised. Despite the tepid reviews, the opera was granted a solitary performance during the following February, but with Flagstad and Marjorie Lawrence on the roster, Traubel received no call to sing the repertory for which she seemed destined.

During 1938, Traubel largely withdrew from concert activities in order to prepare an operatic repertory. An October 8 New York Philharmonic concert performance of the Immolation Scene in 1939 so stirred the audience that she was asked to repeat it in another symphony series. Finally, after having twice turned down the Metropolitan's offer of Venus as unsuitable, Traubel was assigned Sieglinde and made her Wagnerian stage debut on December 28 with Flagstad, Melchior, and Schorr. In spite of her limited acting abilities, her sumptuous singing and personal warmth made a singular impact. An Elisabeth in a February 1940 Tannhäuser was also wonderfully sung, if somewhat ponderous in action. Within a year, Traubel's two soprano colleagues would no longer be at the Met, Flagstad having returned to Norway for WWII's duration and Lawrence having been stricken with polio. At that point, Traubel became indispensable to her company, left to carry on with Wagner, aided only by a very young Astrid Varnay.

Meanwhile, the 1940 - 1941 season offered Traubel relatively little. Her Walküre Brünnhilde was not ready by performance time, so she was left with several Sieglindes. During 1941 - 1942, Traubel was the Brünnhilde when Varnay made her spectacular December 7 debut as the Wälsung sister, and in February she offered a strong Götterdämmerung Brünnhilde, reserving her most powerful and accomplished singing for the final act. For the 1942 - 1943 season, there were advances in her ease on stage as well as splendid singing as Isolde and the Siegfried Brünnhilde (both, however, shorn of the top Cs).

With Melchior and the younger Set Svanholm, Traubel held high the German standards at the Metropolitan during the wars years and beyond. When Flagstad finally returned after her long absence, she insisted on sharing her repertory with Traubel, an artist she greatly admired.

Lauritz Melchior was the first of the great Wagnerian heldentenors (heroic tenors) to sing on records, and he was the first operatic tenor to sing on radio. His recorded legacy is considered a benchmark for all subsequent Siegfrieds and Tristans. One can only imagine what a legacy was lost when he and his wife fled Germany in 1939; his home there was subsequently occupied and looted by both German and Russian soldiers and a collection of unpublished recordings was used for target practice. Contemporary reviews indicated that he was frequently lax in keeping rhythms, and many of his debuts were not completely successful, but he had a long operatic career.

Melchior started singing at an early age, when a boarder in his father's house who was a voice teacher gave Melchior and the other children in the family singing lessons. He often accompanied his sister (who was blind) to the opera, and from her reactions he learned how dramatically powerful a voice can be, even without stagecraft. Like many Wagnerian and heroic tenors, he started his career as a baritone (and very briefly as a bass), first studying privately with Paul Bang, and after he turned 21, studying at the Copenhagen Royal Opera School. His unofficial debut was in 1912 as Germont in La Traviata with a tiny touring company, the Zwicki and Stagel Opera Company, and he made his official debut in 1913 as Silvio in I Pagliacci at the Royal Opera. He remained there for several seasons, first in comprimario roles, and later in major roles, beginning what looked like a solid career as a Verdi baritone when singing di Luna in Il Trovatore and the elder Germont in La Traviata.

A colleague heard him take an unwritten high C in Il Trovatore one evening and told the directors of the Royal Opera she heard the foundation of a heldentenor in Melchior's voice. The management agreed and made arrangements for him to restudy his voice with the tenor Wilhelm Herold. He made his debut as a tenor in 1918 as Tannhauser, again at the Copenhagen Royal Opera. However, he was still uncertain of his technique and voice. In 1919, a wealthy patron encouraged the conductor Henry Woods to audition him, and he had his London debut at the Proms in 1920. He came to the attention of another patron, Hugh Walpole, the noted author, who provided Melchior with a generous allowance to further his studies as well as support his family. His Covent Garden debut was in 1924 as Siegmund. He auditioned for Siegfried Wagner (the son of the composer) and made his Bayreuth debut in 1924 as Parsifal. He continued to take leading roles there, including the legendary 1930 Tristan und Isolde under Toscanini, who dubbed him "Tristanissimo," until shortly before World War II. His Metropolitan debut was in 1926 as Tannhauser and he sang there regularly until 1950, when one of Rudolf Bing's first actions as general manager was to decline to renew his contract. This was partly for extra-musical reasons, including a predilection for practical jokes and appearing on "low brow" venues such as radio comedy and variety shows with Fred Allen and Bing Crosby, and partly for a growing disinclination to attend lengthy rehearsals.

After this dismissal, Melchior retired from the stage, though he continued to appear in films and operettas, sang on the radio (including a broadcast of the first act of Die Walküre from Copenhagen on his 70th birthday), and as part of his own touring music company.

Herbert Janssen -- with his plangent, fine-grained voice, keen intelligence, aristocratic musicianship, and (not incidentally) handsome appearance -- was the leading German baritone in several major theatres during the 1920s and 1930s. After study with Oskar Daniel in Berlin, Janssen made his debut as Herod in Franz Schreker's opera Der Schatzgräber in 1922. He remained at the Berlin State Opera until 1937 singing both lyric and dramatic roles, many of them in the Italian repertory. Elsewhere, his roles were confined largely to the German repertory, with an occasional excursion into a role such as Prince Igor, which he performed at Covent Garden in 1935. In this production, conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham, Janssen received high praise while the rest of the cast were criticized for sounding too Germanic (including Russian bass Alexander Kipnis!).

Janssen was a fixture at the Bayreuth Festival from 1930 to 1937. His Wolfram in Tannhäuser set a standard not approached since, and, fortunately, it was recorded in a somewhat truncated 1930 production. During that decade, he established benchmarks for several Wagner roles, particularly Kurwenal, Telramund, Gunther, and -- especially -- Amfortas. His interpretation of the latter was an exquisitely sung realization of a soul in torment, achieving a remarkable unity of voice, movement, and makeup. His doggedly loyal Kurwenal is preserved on complete recordings of Tristan und Isolde made live at Covent Garden in 1936 and 1937. His tortured Dutchman is also available in a live recording made at Covent Garden and featuring Kirsten Flagstad as Senta.

In addition to his stage work, Janssen acquired a reputation as a superior singer of Lieder. The exceptional beauty of his voice and his interpretive acuity made him a prime candidate for Walter Legge's Hugo Wolf Society venture of the 1930s. Among the finest singers Legge could pull together, Janssen was given the largest assignment and his subscription recordings made throughout the decade remain supreme, even in the face of the best achievements of post-war Lieder singers.

Janssen was very unpopular with the Nazi regime, especially for a number of derisive remarks. Warned to leave Germany in 1937, he traveled first to England, then settled in Austria. When the Nazis invaded, he fled to France. After a season in Argentina, he came to the United States where he made his debut at the Metropolitan Opera in 1939, remaining at that theater until his stage retirement in 1952.

World War II made access to many established European singers impossible, and so Janssen was induced to assume Hans Sachs and Wotan. Although Janssen's was a powerful voice, it lacked the sheer weight and the low pedal tones needed. Perhaps because of the strain, Janssen cancelled performances often, increasingly incurring the displeasure of Met management.

Despite the stress of roles too heavy during his final decade of performing, Janssen retained most of his beauty of voice and all of his musical integrity, a scrupulous and regal artist to the very end. Following retirement, he remained in New York as a respected teacher.

During the late 1920s and the 1930s, a period remembered as one of the golden ages of Wagnerian singing, Emanuel List (born Emanuel Fleissig) was counted as among the finest of basses and specialized in the villain roles in the operas of Wagner and others. He was tall and physically imposing, adding a commanding and dangerous element to his rich, deep, and dark singing tone.

He started his singing career as a boy soprano in the chorus and some solo work on the roster of the Theater an der Wein in Vienna. His family moved to the United States, where he was a vaudeville singer while studying voice with Josiah Zuro.

He returned to Vienna in 1920 for more training and to further his singing career, and soon made a debut at the Volksoper in 1922 in the major role of Mephistopheles. He moved to Berlin in 1923 to accept an engagement as a member of the Charlottenburg opera company, and joined the company of the Berlin State Opera (Staatsoper) in 1925. In the same year, he made a Covent Garden debut as Pogner in Die Meistersinger. He remained a member of the roster of the Staatsoper, making a specialty of such Wagnerian roles as King Mark (Tristan und Isolde), Hunding (Walküre) and Hagen (Götterdämmerung), as the implacable high priest Ramfis in Verdi's Aida, and in his most famous role, Baron Ochs in Richard Strauss' Der Rosenkavalier. He began singing in the Salzburg Festival in Austria, taking the Mozart roles of Osmin (Abduction from the Seraglio), and the Commendatore (Don Giovanni), and Rocco in Beethoven's Fidelio, in addition to King Mark. He appeared in the 1933 Bayreuth Festival as Hunding and Hagen, in addition to Fafner as the giant in Rheingold and as the voice of Fafner's transformed shape of the Dragon in Siegfried. As a Jew, he prudently left German in 1933 and made his debut that year at the Metropolitan Opera in New York as the Landgrave in Tannhäuser. He was a member of the Met company from that year until 1950, and also sang regularly at the opera houses of San Francisco, Chicago, and Buenos Aires, and became a naturalized American citizen. Shortly before retiring, he made his first appearance in nearly 20 years in Berlin in 1950.

Among his famous recordings are performances as Hunding in the cutting of the complete first act of Die Walküre, and as King Mark in the equally famous 1936 Melchior-Flagstad Tristan und Isolde.

Fritz Busch was one the greatest German conductors of the first half of the twentieth century, noted for his illuminating performances and his ethical principles. His father was a former itinerant musician who became an instrument maker, and his brothers were violinist Adolf Busch and cellist Hermann Busch. Fritz Busch went to Cologne Conservatory in 1909, studying conducting with Steinbach.

The city of Aachen hired him as music director in 1912. He served there until the war began, enlisted, and returned at war's end to conducted the Municipal Opera. Six weeks later, he was appointed music director of the Stuttgart Opera. He quickly became famous for his performances and for the reforms he instituted to enlarge the repertory and discover new composers. He premiered two one-act operas of the young Paul Hindemith, operas by Pfitzner, and shook up the Wagnerian tradition by using Appia's modern approach to staging and sets for the Ring operas. Busch accepted a position with the Dresden State Opera, becoming music director in 1922. Among his premieres in the 11 years he remained there were Strauss' Intermezzo (1924) and Die Ägyptische Helena (1928), Hindemith's Cardillac (1926), Busoni's Doktor Faust (1925), and Weill's Der Protagonist (1926). He was credited with keeping Dresden at the highest level of German opera production with stagings that were often provocative, with some of the finest of modern artists designing sets and costumes. One of the most important was a production of Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail, designed by Carl Ebert and including a meticulously chosen cast, at the 1932 Salzburg Festival.

Busch was openly contemptuous of the new Nazi government that was appointed to power in Germany in 1933 and was fired from his Dresden post. At the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, he conducted the first complete performance of Bach's St. Matthew Passion ever given in the Americas. He returned to Europe, appearing with the Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Stockholm Philharmonic, beginning a long-standing relationship with them. Then John Christie asked Busch to become music director of a summer opera festival at Glyndebourne, England. Busch accepted, bringing Ebert as artistic director. Glyndebourne was soon among the most prestigious of summer festivals, famous for meticulous musical preparation and use of the best and most appropriate voices. Mozart has always been a mainstay of Glyndebourne, but under Busch it also staged larger-scale works, including Donizetti's Don Pasquale and Verdi's Macbetto.

With the outbreak of the war (which closed Glyndebourne for the duration and made travel to Scandinavia impossible), he withdrew mainly to South America, although he made appearances at the New York Philharmonic. His Metropolitan Opera debut was on November 26, 1945, in Wagner's Lohengrin. He remained on the Met's conducting roster until 1949, but asked to be allowed to concentrate on conducting the company's annual national tours. He frequently conducted the Chicago Symphony from 1948 to 1950, and resumed his association with the Scandinavian orchestras in 1949 and at Glyndebourne in 1950. He returned to lead a few concerts in Austria (Vienna Staatsoper, 1950) and in Germany (Cologne and Hamburg, 1951).

He died in London, leaving several important recordings. The Busch Brothers Society private label has released several of them as part of a program to document the legacy of Busch, his two brothers, and the piano trio they often formed.