THE AMERICAN soprano Astrid Varnay was a singer whose career had as sensational a start as any in the history of opera. She was born in Stockholm, the child of Hungarian parents both of whom were singers, and the family emigrated to the United States when she was 2 years old. Her remarkable voice became apparent early and her mother was her first teacher, after which she studied with the tenor Paul Althouse and the coach and conductor Hermann Weigert, whom she later married.
In December 1941 she made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, as Sieglinde in Die Walküre in the place of Lotte Lehmann, who was unwell, and at such short notice that there was no time to substitute her name for Lehmann’s in the printed programme. The New York Times thought her performance “satisfying and convincing”. Six days later at the next performance of Wagner’s opera Helen Traubel announced herself unable to sing Brünnhilde; the management had meanwhile found another Sieglinde, so Varnay took Traubel’s place with the same self-confidence as she had Lehmann’s. She was then 23 years old and had never appeared on any stage. It was an extraordinary feat, perhaps comparable only with that of Ponselle who had made her debut in La forza del destino in the same house opposite Caruso in 1918, aged 21 and equally inexperienced.
Varnay’s arrival was timely; Frida Leider had retired and the outbreak of war made Flagstad unavailable, which meant that their roles at the Met fell to Traubel and Margaret Harshaw, both of whom were rather older than Varnay. Over the next 15 years she extended her repertoire and sang a wide variety of parts in New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Mexico City, including Isolde, Senta, Elsa, the Feldmarschallin, Amelia in Simon Boccanegra, Gioconda, Tosca and Santuzza. She also began to take on parts more often sung by mezzosopranos, such as Ortrud, Kundry and Venus in Tannhäuser.
She was first heard at Covent Garden in 1948 as the Siegfried Brünnhilde in a cast that included Hotter, Svanholm and Peter Klein. It was her European debut and her reception was respectful rather than ecstatic. At least one critic concluded she had been put off by the London fog as well as by the insecure conducting of Karl Rankl, then Covent Garden’s music director. Her Isolde, a few days later, was a much happier experience and convinced everyone that a major star had appeared. Thereafter she returned to London as Salome and Aida, and also as the Walküre Brünnhilde in 1951 when her Sieglinde was Flagstad.
The same year she made her debut at Bayreuth where she sang every year without interruption until 1967. The 1951 Ring conducted by Hans Knappertsbusch was recorded by Decca, but only the Götterdämmerung was made available for sale and that many years later. Meanwhile, John Culshaw, the record producer responsible, in his memoirs described Varnay’s Brünnhilde as “superb” and added, when contractual difficulties stopped the immediate issue of the records, that Varnay had long seemed to him to be the most unjustly neglected artist of her generation. In 1956 at her debut at the Paris Opéra Culshaw heard her as Isolde, also with Knappertsbusch, and wrote that he had never heard Isolde’s Act I narrative sung by anyone with such penetration and intensity. After it, Culshaw recalls the delighted conductor blew her a kiss.
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Her debut in Italy was as Verdi’s Lady Macbeth at the Maggio Musicale in Florence in 1951, but her later career in Italy was confined to a few sporadic appearances, always in the German repertoire (Isolde at La Scala in 1956; Brünnhilde in Naples in 1958). The 1950s and 1960s were for Varnay centred on the major theatres of Germany and Austria, but not Salzburg, where she was heard only as Elektra in 1964 and 1965 under von Karajan. She returned to Covent Garden in 1968 as the Kostelnicka and, in the same part, to the Met in 1974. Varnay sang in two world premieres, Menotti’s Island God at the Metropolitan Opera in 1942 and Orff’s Oedipus der Tyrann at Stuttgart in 1959. In the 1970s she taught for a time at the Düsseldorf Musikhochschule and in retirement lived in Munich.
Varnay’s singing was not without its technical imperfections, and could sound laboured and squally, but her enunciation and her pointing of Wagner’s words were exemplary. If her faults meant that she had in some degree to stand in the shadow of her contemporary, Birgit Nilsson (obituary, January 12), her voice was, even so, of compelling quality and amplitude, and at her best she radiated a combination of passion and vulnerability that was extremely moving.
In person she was tall and imposing and, though not a “natural”, by taking pains she became a convincing actress. Her singing on records such as the 1953 Bayreuth Ring conducted by Clemens Krauss suggests that she was underrated by both critics and public at the time.
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Astrid Varnay, American dramatic soprano, was born in Stockholm on April 25, 1918. She died on September 4, 2006, aged 88.