Fifty-Five Years in Five Acts: My Life in Opera (review)

Fifty-Five Years in Five Acts: My Life in Opera Astrid Varnay, with Donald Arthur Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2000 383 pages; $30.00

Attempts to briefly encapsulate an artist so protean as Astrid Varnay are doomed to failure, as Wolfgang Wagner notes in his preface to this book. What good fortune, then, that her reminiscences of her half-century-plus career have finally been published in America, after several years' delay. (Although written in English, the text was initially printed in German as Hab mir's gelobt: 55 Jahre in fünf Akten und einem Prolog.)

The very nature of Varnay's immense voice would predestine her for controversy and the status of an acquired taste. What either endeared or offended, according to one's preferences, was an instrument whose stupendous Klang oft cosseted a fair measure of "clang" as well—the sounding of a tocsin rather than a soft chime. As Venus or Isolde, Varnay could convey a fair measure of heavy-lidded, odalisque sensuality, but heroic metal was the prevailing element in the casting of her voice.

The ambiences of the quarry and the smithy prevail in Paul Jackson's assessment of Varnay, specifically as Elektra, in Sign-Off for the Old Met: "the black marble of her tone own[s] a remarkable density.... Hers is an instrument made for the stern, unforgiving heroine, its mass and metal seemingly forged on the blacksmith's anvil.... The huge outpouring of tone, granitic but not grey, stuns by its bulk." ¹

Varnay's legacy would also be discovered largely after the course of her career had run. Massive, ferric, and often hard-edged, her voice was the sort of instrument that recording engineers find difficult to balance and record flatteringly. Toscanini myopically termed it "too large." (For what?) Varnay's supremacy in Wagner and Strauss also came at a time when those composers were a "hard sell" for the record industry. Combine that with the fact that Varnay was never embraced by impresarios and audiences in America to the degree that she was in Europe, and the soprano had three strikes against her with major recording companies.

Today, when the newest recording of Wagner's Ring cycle features a near-unknown (with another no-name Zyklus in progress), the near loss of Varnay's artistry to future generations could have been tragic. ² Fortunately, there were commercial recordings of Senta and Ortrud (from Bayreuth), Jocasta in Orff's Oedipus der Tyrann, and studio recordings of operatic excerpts. These include a sizzling DG account of the Immolation Scene (winner of a Grand Prix du Disque) plus a Remington recital LP that finds Varnay luxuriating in the parfums of Hérodiade and Manon Lescaut. Films of Salome and Elektra would immortalize Varnay's much-sought-after Herodias and Klytämnestra (334 performances aggregate).

In the 1980s, as the soprano slowly wound down her activities, private LPs of her halcyon years (such as Melodram's "New Bayreuth" series) finally made it possible for younger listeners to appreciate Varnay in her core repertory. As the CD displaced the LP, one could wallow in gray-market pressings of multiple Varnay performances of Elektra, Elisabeth, Isolde, plus seemingly innumerable Brünnhildes. Meanwhile, mainstream labels brought out such late-career cameos as the Countess de Coigny and Stravinsky's Mother Goose.

The arc of Varnay's career is like that of a painter who begins with giant frescoes and ends her career etching the most finely engraved cameos. Unquestionably, Varnay began at the apex of her profession, making her Metropolitan Opera debut in a Saturday afternoon broadcast of Die Walküre. This was the role and circumstance of the debut of her godmother, Kirsten Flagstad, and Varnay was every bit as unknown a quantity in America as Flagstad was. Varnay was an apprentice artist at the time, filling in for Lotte Lehmann, and her ascent to the top would not be...