Ibolyka Astrid Maria Varnay (25 April 1918 – 4 September 2006) was a Swedish-conceived American sensational soprano of Hungarian plummet. She burned through a large portion of her vocation in the United States and Germany. She was one of the main Wagnerian brave sopranos of her age. Her voice on record is promptly unmistakable by its red hot tone and apparently boundless upper register.[1]
Substance
1 Background
2 Career
3 Selected accounts
4 References
5 External connections
Foundation
Both her folks were Hungarian and brought into the world in unassuming communities in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, yet she was brought into the world in Stockholm, where her folks were living during part of World War I. During a Da Capo meet in 1988 Varnay guaranteed that despite the fact that she was brought into the world in Stockholm, her parentage was Hungarian, French and German. Her mom, Maria Junghans (who changed her name to Javor when she made that big appearance as an artist), conceived October 15, 1889, was a prominent coloratura soprano with acoustic accounts shockingly. Her dad was Alexander Varnay (conceived September 11, 1889), a spinto tenor. Drama was the privately-run company, and Varnay grew up behind the stage at the world’s show houses. Her dad established, and the two guardians ran, the Opera Comique in Kristiania (later Oslo), (1918–1921). During one execution, she was wrapped up in the lower cabinet of the changing area bureau of the youthful Kirsten Flagstad.[2]
The family moved to Argentina, at that point New York City, where her dad passed on at age 35 of every 1924. After two years her mom wedded tenor Fortunato de Angelis and the family gotten comfortable New Jersey. Varnay had been concentrating to be a piano player yet chosen at age eighteen to turn into an artist and had escalated vocal exercises with her mother.[3]
Vocation
After a year, Flagstad orchestrated her to begin getting ready functions with Metropolitan Opera staff director and mentor Hermann Weigert (1890–1955). By the age of 22 she knew Hungarian, German, English, French and Italian and her collection comprised of fifteen driving sensational soprano jobs, eleven of which were Wagnerian parts. She additionally had considerable mezzo-soprano capacity, which she showed in exhibitions as Ortrud in Lohengrin and Klytemnestra in Elektra.
She made her thrilling introduction at the Metropolitan Opera on 6 December 1941 out of a transmission execution singing Sieglinde in Wagner’s Die Walküre, filling in for the incapacitated Lotte Lehmann with practically no practice. This was her first appearance in a main job, and it was a triumph.[4] Six days after the fact she supplanted the debilitated Helen Traubel as Brünnhilde in the equivalent opera.[5] Varnay and Weigert turned out to be nearer and were hitched in 1944.[6] It was additionally right now that she had exercises with previous Metropolitan Opera tenor, Paul Althouse.
In 1948, she made her introduction at Covent Garden and in 1951 in Florence as Lady Macbeth. In that year she likewise made her presentation at Bayreuth after Flagstad, who had declined the solicitation to Bayreuth, suggested that Wieland Wagner draw in Varnay. She sang at Bayreuth for the following seventeen years, and showed up routinely at the Metropolitan until 1956.
She left when obviously the Met chief Rudolf Bing didn’t acknowledge her,[7] and proceeded to turn into a backbone of the world’s other extraordinary show houses, particularly in Germany, in Wagner and Strauss yet in addition a few Verdi and different jobs. She had just made Munich her home, where crowds enjoyed her.[citation needed]
In 1969, she surrendered her collection of hefty emotional soprano jobs and started another vocation singing mezzo roles.[8] After being the world’s driving Elektra for more than twenty years, she presently settled herself as an incredible mediator of Klytemnestra. The part of Herodias in Salome turned into her frequently performed job: 236 exhibitions. She got back to the Metropolitan in 1974 and last showed up there in Weill’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny in 1979. In 1975 she showed up as Herodias in the creation of Salome with Teresa Stratas which was shot with the Vienna Philharmonic and coordinated by Gotz Friedrich.
During the 1980s, character jobs currently turned into Varnay’s metier. Her keep going appearance in front of an audience was in Munich in 1995, 55 years after her Metropolitan presentation. In 1998, she distributed her personal history Fifty-Five Years in Five Acts: My Life in Opera, composed with Donald Arthur (German title is Hab’ mir’s gelobt).
In 2004, a narrative about her life and first New York vocation entitled Never Before got praise in the USA. Her chronicles of Strauss courageous women, for example, Elektra and Salome alongside the Wagnerian jobs are among the fortunes of the medium, while records of transmission exhibitions of her incredible jobs archive her specialty in sound, and a couple of video accounts of her late vocation protect proof of her acting capacity. Varnay passed on in Munich on 4 September 2006 at age 88.