The Right Stuffing

Since the late great Lillian Nordica's gaslit heyday (1890-1910) U.S. woman's weight has dwindled. One result : a scarcity of great U.S. Wagnerian sopranos. Today few U.S. women singers have the beef and brawn that helped Nordica and her famous U.S. contemporaries (Olive Fremstad,* Emma Eames, etc.) to shout down batteries of Wagnerian trumpets and trombones.

One large exception is Helen Traubel, a redhaired, green-eyed, 200-lb. Midwesterner who for the past four years has been singing more & more Wagnerian leads at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera. Rated by some critics the vocal equal of famed Kirsten Flags tad (whose roles she has inherited), Helen Traubel is far & away the finest U.S. Wagnerian soprano of her generation, and one of the three or four finest in the world. Last week, as the Metropolitan's annual Wagner cycle came to an end, Traubel could claim an added distinction: no other U.S. soprano since Nordica had sung the three-volume role of Bruennhilde (Walkuere, Siegfried, Goetterdaemmerung) right through in successive performances.

Bayreuth By-Passed. Though she sings her Bruennhildes and Isoldes like a veteran of Bayreuth, Helen Traubel has been outside the U.S. only twice in her life: on tours to Canada and Cuba. Her father ran a drugstore in St. Louis. Her mother, Clara Stuhr, was famous among the Midwest's German-American singing societies for her soprano. Traubel herself got an early reputation as the best belly-flopper among Forest Park's sledders, a massive destroyer of chocolate ice-cream sodas, and an almost maniacal fan of the St. Louis Cardinals. At 15, with her mother's help, she began slowly and methodically cultivating her voice. She continued doing so, in relative obscurity, for more than 20 years.

In 1934 Walter Damrosch went to St. Louis to conduct an oldtime German Stinger fest and found Traubel scheduled as a soloist. He was so bowled over by her voice that he invited her to Manhattan, promptly wrote a part for her in his opera The Man without a Country. The opera 'was a flop, but Traubel stayed on in Manhattan, cooking her own meals, mending her own clothes, plugging away patiently at her vocal studies. Two years later she managed to scrape up the cash for a Town Hall debut and critics made such a fuss that the Metropolitan added her to its permanent staff.

Baseball Banned. Today Helen Traubel averages more than 60 concerts a year on tours throughout the U.S. Her homely Midwestern habits have changed but little. Indestructibly good-natured, she has never been known to have a fit of temperament. Baseball has been forbidden her, because she always yells herself hoarse. But she goes to rip-roaring Western movies and listens to the Lone Ranger on the radio. Her husband is a onetime stockbroker, now her personal manager.

Helen Traubel discusses her operatic exploits with a great bellowing laugh, claims she works off as many pounds during a Wagnerian performance as a Yale quarterback in the Harvard game. "Dieting is all right for those little coloratura sopranos," says she, "but not for me. You've got to have plenty of stuffing to sing Wagner."

*Though she was born in Sweden, Minnesota-raised Soprano Fremstad made her reputation as a Wagnerian singer entirely in the U.S.

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