Sack in Alt

When Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart made his first visit to Italy, at 14, he heard a soprano called La Bastardella sing an "unbelievable" C in altissimo, an octave above the C in alt (high C) which is the difficult top of many a soprano's reach. Later in his Magic Flute, Mozart wrote for the Queen of Night--one of the most difficult coloratura soprano roles sung today--nothing higher than F in alt, or three and one-half tones below C in altissimo. Less than a century after Mozart's death, Jenny Lind produced effortless C's above high C. Among high coloraturas of the past half century, Luisa Tetrazzini was one of the most famed for her high F#. Half a dozen years ago, however, in the small provincial opera at Bielefeld, Germany, a newly-hired soprano sat practicing cadenzas at a piano, inadvertently sang up to a high G. Surprised, she tried some more, later that day discovered she could sing C in altissimo. Last week that soprano, Erna Sack, made her U. S. debut by radio.

When Erna Sack, a comely blonde stenographer in Berlin, saved her pfennigs to study voice, she thought she was a mezzo-soprano. So did her first teacher, although a subsequent teacher lightened her voice so that, when Conductor Bruno Walter heard it, he gave her small lyric soprano parts at the Charlottenburg Opera. After her accidental discovery of C in altissimo, Soprano Sack perfected her coloratura. When, as a member of the able Dresden Opera, she sang in the world premiere of Richard Strauss's Schweigsame Frau (The Silent Woman), and later in a revival of his Ariadne Auf Naxos, Composer Strauss wrote in extra fioriture for her nimble vocal chords.

Last Sunday, as a member of General Motors' radio singing troupe, Soprano Sack aimed at her super-high C in a quick staccato passage in Strauss's Voices of Spring, succeeded in singing a brief B, amazed her listeners with two long, rarefied high G's toward the end of this difficult work. This week she makes her U. S. operatic debut, disdaining a wig, as a 100% blonde Rosina in The Barber of Seville, in the Chicago City Opera. Accompanied by her husky, jovial husband, a onetime Berlin taxicab driver who is now her manager, Mme Sack lives plainly in plain hotels, arises daily at 7 a. m., dislikes to practice. Of her voice, Soprano Sack says: "Every manager, everywhere I go, wants me to give the public my high notes. Very well, I give them. But I give them as a kind of extra present. Please understand, I am a normal singer. ... I refuse to transpose anything to display my high notes. I insist on singing in the original key."

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