Isolde's Return

In a third-floor lounge of the Metropolitan Opera House one morning last week, 40 members of the Met chorus were taking a rehearsal break when a large, pink-cheeked woman passed their open door. Was it? Yes, it was. Choristers called out an impromptu greeting: "Welcome back, Madame Flagstad!"

Soprano Kirsten Flagstad was indeed back at the Met for the first time in ten years, for the first time since she left it in 1941 to join her husband in occupied Norway. The salute of the Met choristers was only a small part of the welcome.

Letters have been coming to her from friends and complete strangers, coast to coast: "Please don't overdo before the 22nd"--the date of her return this week in her most famous role, Isolde, in Wagner's Tristan and Isolde. "Please take care of yourself so you will be in good voice," wrote another. "We have waited so long, and you must not let us down."

Five Costumes. Kirsten Flagstad had no serious doubts. The greatest Wagnerian soprano of her generation, she still possesses, at 55, a voice as incomparable as ever. As for the role of Isolde, she has worn out five complete costumes singing it since she first brought Met audiences to their knees in 1935.

Flagstad said that she was not overexcited about her return: "No, I have stopped being sentimental." It was a trouper's speech, and Flagstad is a trouper. She has been singing opera now for 37 years, and the theater is in her blood and background. Her father worked in Oslo's Central Theater as a violinist and conductor, her mother as a vocal coach. The first score that flaxen-haired Kirsten ever "yelled out" as a child was Gilbert & Sullivan's The Mikado. She learned Lohengrin before she was 14.

When Kirsten was 16, she started to study. She recalls that "my voice was very small, but it carried." For many years she sang light lyric roles (Mimi, Rosalinda). Her voice first began to grow into its present astonishing hall-filling power when she started to study Isolde, at 37. She found that after only three weeks of the vocal exertion Wagner demands, "my back became two inches broader. I did not gain any weight, but I couldn't get into my old dresses."

Operatic Home. Manhattan Banker (and Met Angel) Otto Kahn discovered her in 1929. After hearing her sing Tosca in Oslo, he told Met Manager Giulio Gatti-Casazza that she was a singer to watch. Before Gatti got around to taking this advice, Flagstad accepted a bid from Bayreuth. It was the first time she had sung outside of Scandinavia. Says she: "I was quite happy where I was. I was never ambitious. Always I wanted to be a private person."

The world of music had other plans. Within two years she was hired by the Met. Her first Sieglinde in Die Walkuere won her critical acclaim. Four days later, after her first sensational Isolde, she moved right into the No. 1 dressing room, held it for seven seasons.

Then came the war; she sang only four times, twice in Sweden, twice in Switzerland. Since then, European and U.S. audiences have heard her more often, found her voice still full of a rich, earth-mother quality that no other living soprano possesses. This week, as a damp-eyed Met audience gave greying Kirsten Flagstad a long ovation, she was back on the stage she calls "my operatic home."

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