Flagstad Sings

Last week, like Bruennhilde suddenly emerging from Wotan's imprisoning fire, Kirsten Flagstad was reported to have appeared in Sweden. It was rumored that, with her quisling husband, she had fled from Norway without permission of the Nazis, was trying to reach the U.S.

"Highly improbable," said Norwegians in exile. If Singer Flagstad and her husband had "escaped," they sniped, it must have been with cheering crowds of Nazis wishing them Godspeed and auf Wiedersehen. Chances are, said they, that Kirsten Flagstad was simply on her way to her summer home in Kristiansand.

U.S. opera-lovers remember Singer Flagstad with reverence and affection as the greatest Isolde since Nordica. She returned to Norway in April 1941 for a summer's visit, then broke a two-month silence to announce that she would remain there until the war ended. More silence followed, punctuated only by rumors--that the Norwegian Bruennhilde, who likes good food & drink, was enjoying plenty of both in heavily rationed Norway; that she was a popular guest at quisling parties; that en route to Norway she had stopped in Berlin, described Nazi Germany as "a lovely place." And it was no rumor but fact that Flagstad's husband, to whom she is devoted, florid, balding Henry Johansen, was not anti-Nazi before the Nazis invaded Norway, has since supported Vidkun Quisling.

But it is also a fact that, whatever her views, Singer Flagstad has not sung since her return, either in Norway or in any of the big German opera houses.

Only in Switzerland, in freedom's land, has Flagstad sung. There, fortnight ago, at Zurich, she sang in three operas. One was Beethoven's Fidelio, in which the heroine flourishes her pistol at a tyrant.

To reporters Kirsten Flagstad said little, but that little was as eloquent as her tremendous voice. Asked how it felt to be in free Switzerland, she replied in broken German: "We just walk around and look and look. Oh, everything is so marvelous and beautiful, like a fairy tale."

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