Page 189 - Birgit Nilsson Book

BIRGIT NILSSON’S TRIUMPHANT RETURN TO NEW YORK
By the mid-1950s New Yorkers were receiving increasingly ecstatic reports from Europe about a Swedish soprano whose powerful voice, pinpoint accuracy and solid technique could meet the most demanding challenges of the Wagner/Strauss repertoire. Birgit Nilsson, the extraordinary singer in question, had auditioned three times for Rudolf Bing, then the Metropolitan Opera’s autocratic manager, before finally appearing in a new production of Tristan und Isolde. However, this belated début actually played to the soprano’s good fortune: when she finally arrived on the stage of the “old” Met on 18 December 1959 Birgit Nilsson was at the top of her form. Her triumph was complete, and the next day her début was front-page news at both the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune. The newspapers not only compared Nilsson to the legendary Kirsten Flagstad at her peak, but also fell over one another to find superlatives describing this vocal phenomenon. That Nilsson began her autobiography with her Met début and, ultimately, chose to spend two and a half months with the company each season underlines the pivotal nature of New York to her career.
Ten days after her historic Met début, good fortune smiled again upon this child of the Nordic gods, and once more she found herself on the front page of the New York Times. When both the originally scheduled tenor and his cover fell ill, the ever-persuasive Bing arranged for each tenor to sing one act of Tristan to Nilsson’s Isolde while finding a third tenor for the final act. From this episode an aura of invincibility came to surround her, and indeed she sometimes appeared under truly adverse circumstances: after a car accident (Siegfried, 1962), during a gallstone attack (Aida, 1963), with a sprained ankle (Elektra, 1971) or even a dislocated shoulder (Götterdämmerung, 1974).
In February 1965 Nilsson scored one of her greatest New York triumphs with a new production of Strauss’s Salome, and this inevitably suggested a new Elektra. The occasion was provided by the Metropolitan Opera’s move to Lincoln Center in 1966-67, and the production’s opening night, 28 October 1966, was another huge success for Birgit Nilsson and her long-time colleague, the celebrated Viennese soprano Leonie Rysanek (another all-time Met favorite) as Chrysothemis. Both of these legendary portrayals are captured on the present DVD performance, videotaped in 1980.
LA NILSSON 189