How can one describe greatness? Is it possible to make someone who never saw a certain performer feel what the live experience was like? Today singers are often judged on the basis of their recordings, and often seem to use their live appearances solely to publize them, rather than vice-versa. But fortunately there have always been singers that have realized that an true operatic performance can only take place on stage. That opera only reveals its true stature in a performance in which the vocal and dramatic performance become an indivisible whole.
There have always been, and are now perhaps more than ever, many excellent singers who are also excellent actors. But there are a handful who are somehow more----who attain greatness, who raise their chosen form of art to the highest possible level. In the last fifty years we have been blessed with several such performers; Maria Callas, Regina Resnik, Hans Hotter, Tito Gobbi come immediately to mind......and Astrid Varnay.
Fortunately there are many people who still have vivid memories of her onstage performances in her greatest roles....Elektra, Ortrud, Isolde, Bruennhilde.... and even more who experienced the triumphs of her "second" career....Herodias, Klytemnestra, the Kostelnicka.... But there are, of course, many more who didn't, who started going to the opera too late, or were simply in the wrong place (in New York in the late fifties, where opera lovers were deprived of the history making performances she was giving in Germany.) For them, of course, there are the recordings. Not so many commercial recordings as there might have been, but fortunately all her greatest roles (with the exception, I think of "Fidelio") are available in live performances on CD, many of them from Bayreuth, often in several different versions from several different seasons. And this is probably just as well; like many singers who are primarily stage creatures, Varnay was seldom at her best in the recording studio. Probably also because, like Nilsson, the recording engineers had trouble capturing adequately a voice of that size and richness. Her high notes, which in the studio recordings tend to sound disconnected from the rest of the voice, ring out with primaeval force in the live recordings.
Yes, the voice. Varnay has cited Kirsten Flagstad as her idol. Interestingly of the three great post-war Wagner sopranos, Varnay, Nilsson and Moedl, Varnay's voice was closest in type to Flagstad's, although the sound was of course much different. But Moedl was a mezzo-soprano with enough high register to see her through the Wagner dramatic roles for a while. Nilsson, on the other hand, had a voice much brighter in basic type, with its greatest strength in the high register. Like Flagstad's, Varnay's greatest strength was in her full and rich middle register, but with a solid register above it. The perfect vocal construction for Wagner's demands on his sopranos. Her singing, as heard especially in the Bayreuth performances, has a quality which tried to put a name to for a long time. Finally the word has occured to me. it is a strange word to apply to a performer of her dramatic intensity, but the word is "relaxed."
Listen to her "Goetterdaemmerung" in the 1958 Bayreuth performance for instance. When was the last time you heard a Bruennhilde who, having reached the Immolation Scene with her voice as fresh at it was at the beginning of "Walkuere," secure in the knowledge that she has no problems, and everything is going to go right....and that at Knappertsbusch's tempos!......actually sounds as if she is enjoying herself?
But the recordings, magnificent as many of them them are, only give a pale reflection of what is was like to see her on the stage. Someone said of Charles Laughton; "When he was just sitting there, he was doing too much!" Varnay, like Resnik and Hotter could dominate a scene by doing absolutely nothing. Unforgettable the first act of "Lohengrin"; Ortrud is onstage for the entire act, her only solo lines are in ensemble. Varnay remained immovable the whole time, but your eye was continually drawn back to her, and the one movement she did make, a start when Lohengrin appeared in his swan-pulled boat, hit home with the effect of one of Jupiter's thunder-bolts.
It was this ability to fill effortlessly a theater with her personality, that lay behind Wieland Wagner's famous answer to a reviewer who asked why his productions almost always took place on empty stages. "Why do I need a tree on stage when I have Astrid Varnay?" This was especially brought home to me personally in 1969 when I saw her in "Goetterdaemmerung" shortly after seeing Nilsson in the same role. In 1969 Nilsson was at her phenominal vocal peak, and was a much better actress than she was often given credit for being. But when she sang "Grane, mein Ross!" you thought "typical modern production...no horse in sight!" When Varnay sang the same line, the horse was there. And yet, objectively speaking, she didn't actually really "do" anything different. How did she do it? Probably even she doesn't know. Some performers just have a mysterious source of energy to tap into that just isn't available to others.
Of course, she was a true actress. By which I mean she approached her roles as an actress does, answering the classic five "W" questions...."Who" "What" "Why" "When" and "Where." Her recent autobiography offers ample evidence of this. How many other Herodias' have gone beyond the text, beyond Wilde or the Bible to the historical sources available, who know what happened to Herodes and Herodias before and after the action of the opera? Who else could fill four pages discussing the interpretation of what is usually considered a minor role...Mamma Lucia in "Cavalleria Rusticana", a figure that, in her hands, became as central to the drama as Santuzza and Turiddu?
On the other hand she had a quality which is extremely rare. Most performers with this strength of personality tend to eclipse those on stage with them. Varnay's strength was such, that everyone on stage with her was inspired to reach a level of intensity which they seldom otherwise obtained. Given this, it is not surprising to hear how beloved and admired she was among her partners.
On the first page, I quoted Horst Hofmann, who talked about the strength that emanated from her onstage. As he said, "I always feel nothing can happen to me, I'm on stage with Astrid Varnay. You can't imagine what it is like to stand across the stage from her in the third act of "Jenufa", for instance."
Frangiskos Voutsinos, a Greek bass, said to me "I sang Orestes with many Elektras. But only Varnay was right. When she recognized Orestes, fell to the ground and kissed my feet, tears poured out of my eyes."
In Toronto in 1969, Mignon Dunn had to cancel a performance of Klytemnestra, and her understudy, a Toronto mezzo named Elsie Sawchuck, had to jump in. At that time in Toronto, understudies were given no musical or staging rehearsals, on the theory that they would never have to go on anyway. Sawchuck was a seasoned performer, but she went on stage terrified, to say the least. She is eternally grateful to Varnay, who did most of their scene together with her back to the audience, feeding her the lines. Paul Gudas, who was Fatty the Bookkeeper to her Widow Begbick in "Mahagoony" in Zurich, says now "I can't believe I actually performed with Astrid Varnay. She was so wonderful to a young kid from the opera studio, and never attempted to dominate our scenes together, which she so easily could have.
The greatest testimony I know to her sense of artistic responsibility came from Doris Jung, an American soprano who made her German debut as Elsa, a role she had never before performed, with a cast that included Varnay and Windgassen. Since the production was a revival, there were only two rehearsals. "Varnay, who, of course, sang Elsa at the beginning of her career, helped me so much with the role," she said. "Even more, in the first seven of the eight performances we did together, she held back her Ortrud, so as not to overwhelm me. The balance of the whole performance was more important to her than making the biggest possible impression herself. Before the last performance, she came to me and said "Today I'm going to give gas." And she went out and gave all she had. Later she came to me and said "Tonight I did that because I knew you could take it now." "
It was an amazing career. It spanned over half a century,from her sensational debut at the very top of the ladder, as Sieglinde at the Metropolitan Opera in 1941, to her final performance as the Nurse in "Boris Godonov" in Munich in 1995, 54 years later.
The first thirty of these years were spent singing the heaviest, most dramatic roles in the repertoire. She sang her first Bruennhilde (in "Walkuere") in 1941, and her final one (in "Goetterdaemmerung") in 1971. Altogether she sang 18 Wagner roles, which is probably a record. Towards the end of the sixties, she realized her days in that repertory were numbered, and she gradually built an enormously successful "second" career in character roles. Her first attempt in this direction was Herodias, which proved to be the role she sang the most, 213 times. This second career brought her many new triumphs; Klytemnestra, the Kostelnicka, the Amme in "Frau ohne Schatten", Widow Begbick, to name only a few, and, among other things, brought her a triumphant return to her home theater, the Metropolitan Opera, where she had been absent for 18 years.
Fortunately some of these roles have been preserved on video; her Herodias and Klytemnestra in Goetz Friedrich's TV productions of "Salome" and "Elektra"; her Juno in the Berlin "Orpheus in der Unterwelt"; her Begbick in "Mahagonny" from the Met, and, above all, her Kostenicka in Guenther Rennert's Munich production of "Jenufa." It is, however, a great pity that the great dramatic roles of her vocal prime weren't preserved on film. Those who didn't see her Elektra or Orturd can't really know what they were like. But those who did, do. On countless evenings, she showed us the heights that the art-form opera is capable of attaining when performed by a great and serious artist, who is capable of filling all the vocal, musical, and dramatic demands a role makes, and who realizes that in the long run these three demands actually form one indivisible whole.
For that we can only thank her for the depth of our hearts.