Kirstin Flagstad

Each year on this day, July 12th, Mrs Little Jimmy and I engage in an
orgiastic, yet respectful, celebration of Kirstin Flagstad's birthday. We
always skip the cake and head straight for the Aqvavit. We don't have any of
her recordings so Mrs Little Jimmy usually sings Mild und Leise to my
improvised guitar accompaniment. Memorable . .
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Review by Lawrence Gilman in the New York Herald Tribune, February 3, 1935:

A New Wagner Singer Makes Her American Debut at the Metropolitan

It is a pleasure to salute in Mme. Kirsten Flagstad, the Metropolitan's new
dramatic soprano, an artist of surprising and delightful quality. Mme.
Flagstad, who made her American debut yesterday afternoon as Sieglinde, has
come to us without benefit of ballyhoo. Her name was unfamiliar here except
to a few observers on the critical watch-towers who knew that this young
Norwegian from Oslo had sung at Bayreuth during the last two seasons
(Ortlinde and the Third Norn in 1933, Sieglinde and Gutrune in 1934), and
that experienced observers who had heard her in Europe spoke well of her.
Yesterday's audience was therefore unprepared for the disclosure that
awaited them, and to which they paid frequent tributes of enthusiastic
recognition.

Mme. Flagstad is that rare avis in the Wagnerian woods - a singer with a
voice, with looks, with youth. She is not merely another of those autumnal
sopranos who passed their prime when the Kaiser was a boy, and whose
waistlines have gone to that bourne from which no slenderness returneth.

I cannot swear that Mme. Flagstad is in her thirties, but the point is that
she looks as if she were, and sings as if she were. The voice itself is both
lovely and puissant. In its deeper register it is movingly warm and rich and
expressive, and yesterday it recalled to wistful Wagnerites the
irrecoverable magic of Olive the immortal. [The reference is to Olive
Fremstad.] The upper voice is powerful and true, and does not harden under
stress.

The singing that we heard yesterday is that of a musician with taste and
brains and sensibility, with poetic and dramatic insight. It was heartening,
for example, to encounter a Sieglinde sufficiently imaginative to give their
due effect to such significant details as the dream-like quality of tone and
phrasing which should imbue the wonderful passage in which Sieglinde gropes
for her memory of her brother's voice in childhood, and finds it in the
recognition of her own clear tones as they echoed back to her from the
evening woods.

Her acting is noteworthy for its restraint and poise. She does not indulge
in those imbecile operatic gestures which Wagner detested - he called them
"swimming exercises." Mme. Flagstad expresses volumes with a turn of the
head of a lifting of the hand. She was at times a bit inflexible yesterday;
but that may possibly have due to nervousness.

She is solacing to the eye - comely and slim, and sweet of countenance. "I
still need a Sieglinde!" wrote Wagner despairingly to a friend while he was
casting the "Ring" for Bayreuth sixty years ago. "That need," he added, "is
a calamity - for she must be slender." Wagner knew his Germans. Yesterday
was one of those comparatively rare occasions when the exigent Richard might
have witnessed with happiness an embodiment of his Sieglinde. For this was a
beautiful and illusive re-creation, poignant and sensitive throughout, and
crowned in its greater moments with an authentic exaltation.

The rest of the cast was familiar and admirable. Siegmund is Mr. Althouse's
most successful Wagnerian achievement, and yesterday he companioned
responsively the new Sieglinde. The others were at their most eloquent and
effective.

The performance as a whole gave us a memorable "Walküre," one in the best
tradition of our times, responsive to the mighty tremor of Wagner the Titan.