Happy Heroine

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Opening night at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera is an established American ritual. Everybody understands that the cast furnishes half the show and the audience the rest, and that polite ones on either side should not impinge on the other's act.

Next week the heavy oak doors will swing open on the Met's 62nd season. Out front there will be strapless gowns in the boxes, and straphangers in the gallery; backstage there will be extras in armor, seamstresses in a hurry and props in the way. A good many of the fur-wrapped natives in the Diamond Horseshoe will be there under the same grim or triumphal compulsion that gets them to church once a year for Easter services. A good many of the gallerygoers will clump up 119 steps like pious martyrs, sure that they are the only ones in the house that really like the stuff.

Not until the fourth night--after a warmup of Delibes, Mozart and Puccini --will the curtains part on the serious business of a Wagnerian music drama. That night in Siegfried, the fans will get the season's first eye-&-earful of the reigning queen of the Met, heroic-voiced, heroic-sized Helen Traubel.

Wagner's heavy oil is what makes the wheels of the Met go round. Of the Met's eight most frequently heard operas, four are his--Lohengrin, Tannhaeuser, Tristan und Isolde and Die Walkuere. From Caruso's debut (1903) until eleven years ago, the Met had a thick Italian accent. Then came the great Norwegian, Kirsten Flagstad, to join the great Dane, Lauritz Melchior--two singers with the bellows and brawn to shout down the batteries of trumpets and trombones that Wagner put to work in the pit. Since Flagstad went home to her quisling husband and semi-retirement in 1941, the Met's Wagnerian first team has been Melchior and Traubel.

Home-Grown Wagnerian. At first by default, and increasingly by merit, Helen Traubel has become the greatest Wagnerian soprano singing in the world today. She is the first great soprano at the Met to sing Wagner and nothing but (Flagstad sang Beethoven's Fidelia). She is also the first American-born Bruennhilde and Isolde who didn't study at the Wagnerian shrine at Bayreuth. Until 1940, when she sang in Canada, Helen Traubel had never been out of the U.S. She has never crossed the Atlantic.

Helen Traubel at 43 is a prima donna in technique but not in temperament. A hearty, buxom woman with auburn hair and green eyes, she is as relaxed as a double-jointed shortstop. According to her husband, she is so chronically good-natured that "no one is ever quite sure whether she is stupid or lethargic." She was born above her father's drugstore in the old German section of South St. Louis, and brought up in so deeply Germanic an environment that she still punctuates her conversations with ach and ja.

As a skinny tomboy with red pigtails she liked to romp over to Grossmama's, where amateur violinists and cellists sawed their way through Brahms and Beethoven while writers on the local German-language newspaper argued politics and were kept from quarreling by matriarchal Grossmama ("her strength lay in her gentleness"). At mealtimes, as many as 30 sat around Grossmama's huge table to eat her Sauerbraten, Hasenpjeffer, herring salad and Torten and Kaffee stollen. "We had a gemuetlich upbringing," says Traubel. "Our theory was 'lucky is the person who is happy.' "

Take Me Out to the Ball Game. Father was a soft touch. Every day Helen lined up her schoolmates at his soda fountain. Helen was rationed to two sodas a day, but usually managed to borrow against the future. Father read Andersen's and Grimm's fairy tales to his kids; if there was a vaudeville show he took them, and never mind about classes. Summers he and Helen fished in Wisconsin; winters it was duck hunting in the Illinois River, and Helen had a small shotgun made specially for her. During baseball season, Helen got up from her school desk promptly at 2 p.m. every day, strode out to meet her father. Their box was directly over the dugout, and Helen knew all the St. Louis players in both leagues.

Nobody--least of all her teachers--could understand how that Traubel girl managed to get any education at all. Even the teachers assumed that Helen would be a singer; sometimes they'd ask for a song. Helen would sing Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland; if any boy groaned, "I'd bounce him on the head as I went by." When she got too far behind in her studies Father Otto hired a tutor, told her to "kindly stuff this little goose." Says Helen Traubel today: "I may be a numskull scholastically, but what I remember of my family--it was so wonderful. So I misspell a word!"

Otto Traubel died before he could hear Helen sing Mendelssohn's Spring Song at her Wyman School commencement. (And Helen Traubel's mother died just three months before Helen's big Manhattan success in 1939.)

Jaw Down, Sing Down. Helen's mother, something of a local concert singer herself, sent 13-year-old Helen to a friend of her own childhood, Madame Vetta Karst, the most exacting voice teacher in St. Louis. A birdlike little woman with an uncontrollable temper, Madame Karst screeched and nagged, threw pillows at her pupils. One day Helen sobbed, "I can never satisfy you!" "When you can satisfy me you won't need me any more," snapped Madame Karst. She taught Traubel to sing "down" so her tones would go over; to drop her jaw as far as possible to get a "free" tone without strain ("You can't go through a closed door"). Once Madame Karst shouted, "My God, you big cow, how can you do that? Don't cocky-doodle-doo!"

For a month Helen Traubel paid Madame Karst $5 for each lesson. After that the teacher refused to take any pay, though Helen went to her almost daily for 17 years. Says Helen: "That was her way of controlling me. She was a damned intelligent teacher." Madame Karst, still giving lessons today at 85, says that Traubel always "sang as if she were alone in the room."

In the same unself-conscious way, Helen never doubted that she would be a great singer, and because she was so sure, she was in no hurry. When she was 23, in the summer of 1926, Rudolph Ganz, the conductor of the St. Louis Symphony, took her to New York's Lewisohn Stadium for a guest appearance. That was the year Lauritz Melchior made his Metropolitan debut in Tannhaeuser, an event eclipsed by another debut the evening of the same day. With the greatest blowing & puffing of publicity ever to accompany a U.S. operatic debut, Marion Talley, an 18-year-old Kansas City soprano, sang Gilda in Rigoletto, to the clicking of telegraph keys and the onrush of trainloads of Kansas citizenry. After three years of straining her immature voice, Marion Talley retired from opera for good. (Currently the Met is plugging immature Patrice Munsel, a Spokane coloratura who made her Met debut in 1943 at 18.)

Traubel was five years older than Talley, but when Giulio Gatti-Casazza, general director of the Metropolitan, offered her an audition, she turned it down, saying that she was too young. "I knew I wasn't ready. If the prophet Moses had come down and asked me to sing at the Met I would have said, 'You run your business, I'll run mine.' " She went back to St. Louis and Madame Karst.

For eight years more she studied. Most of her public singing was as soloist every Sunday in St. Louis' fashionable Pilgrim Congregational Church, and on Friday nights and Saturdays in the United Hebrew Temple. Together the two jobs paid her $3,600 a year. Every so often she made an extra $100 singing at funerals.

Wedding in Weehawken. In 1934 white-maned Walter Damrosch visited St. Louis to guest-conduct the annual German singing societies Saengerjest, and was outraged to learn that a local soprano had been signed as one of the soloists. After a rehearsal of the Liebestod he mopped his brow excitedly,, kissed Traubel and said: "My dear, I brought

Johanna Gadski to this country.* Now at 72 I find you in St. Louis."

Two years later, Damrosch called Helen Traubel to New York to sing The Man Without a Country. His opera survived only five performances at the Metropolitan, but Helen Traubel so impressed NBC officials that they offered her a $10,000 contract. Traubel soon decided that she liked neither the music she had to sing nor the way she had to sing it, and tore up the contract.

At a friend's house in Greenwich Village she met William Bass, a cheerful and rotund New Yorker who is now her business adviser. Both were already married,/- but they got divorces and were married by the Mayor of Weehawken, N.J. in October 1938. Then came the hardest times of Helen Traubel's life. She and Bill were broke. In a dark two-room West syth Street apartment near Carnegie Hall they cooked occasional lamb stews, sometimes had to scrape up money for food by cashing in on their empty milk and soda-pop bottles. They visited the Central Park zoo, and for evenings out, walked down to 42nd Street for a 10-c- Wild West movie, stopping for a hamburger on the way.

Always skinny for her size, though her shoulders were as broad as a fullback's, Helen discovered that she didn't have the resistance to practice from 9 to 5. When she could afford them, Helen began stuffing herself with potatoes and fattening desserts, gained 25 Ibs. in one year. As her chest and stomach got rounder and fuller, so did her voice. "I gave up any idea of being svelte." She laughs louder than anyone at jokes about her massiveness. Now she weighs 186 Ibs.

Change in Regime. One Sunday afternoon in 1939, just after her first recital in Manhattan's Town Hall, Traubel sang the Immolation Scene from Goeterdaemerung with the Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra of New York. She was quickly offered a Metropolitan contract; this time she was ready. In her Met debut as Sieglinde in Die Walkuee, Flagstad sang Bruennhilde and Lauritz Melchior Siegmund. Traubel's opulent tones sent critics away raving. Said the New York Times: "The voice is a glorious one." After an Ann Arbor concert, a reviewer put it in good plain Michigan talk: "Miss Traubel hoisted a couple of tones across Hill Auditorium that could have been used for girders."

For two years Traubel and Flagstad divided most of the leading Wagnerian roles. In Die Walkuere, Traubel sang a dozen Sieglindes to Flagstad's Bruennhildes. The usually aloof Flagstad finally said to Traubel: "I think it is now time we turn this around and I sing Sieglinde and you sing Bruennhilde." The change never came off. Shortly afterwards Flagstad returned to German-occupied Norway.*

The change of prima donnas changed the Met's backstage atmosphere. When she wasn't on stage, Flagstad had knitted quietly in the wings, avoided visitors. Traubel opened the door of her dingy little dressing room to anyone who could crowd inside. Her laughter boomed so lustily that stage managers feared it could be heard in the auditorium. In the old horse-&-buggy era, Wagnerian divas like Johanna Gadski and Lillian Nordica had expected even the stagehands to wait on them. Traubel insists on putting on her own makeup, wig and costumes, because "being dependent is a luxury you shouldn't allow yourself."

Diamond v. Ruby. The most provocative argument in opera today is who is the greater--Flagstad or Traubel. If Flagstad were to return (as now seems unlikely) who would have the top roles? For the 1946-47 season the answer is plain: Traubel is signed up. There is no doubt that the Met finds it easier to work with the untemperamental Traubel--and the Met is always willing to let well enough alone. Because European opera houses have been shattered and their companies scattered, the Met has become, by a survival of the luckiest, perhaps the leading opera house of the world. It packs in 24,000 people a week, and an additional ten million listen to the ABC Saturday broadcasts.

Nobody seems to care that only three-quarters of the Met's 3,500 seats have a full view of the stage. The Met's hidebound directors have kept out all Negro singers--including Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson. It may not be the Met's fault that opera is a declining art (the last first-rate popular opera was written in 1910), but the Met so far has done nothing to encourage the most promising opera composer of the day, England's young Benjamin (Peter Grimes) Britten (TIME, Aug. 19).

At the Met's box office, the debate about Traubel and Flagstad is irrelevant: Wagner continues to sell out. There are still some who prefer Flagstad's glacial perfection to Traubel's warmer but more uneven performances. Traubel's singing, being more emotional, generally improves as the evening goes on; she is at her best in the great third act of Tristan.

Lauritz Melchior, who has sung about 125 times opposite each, says: "Flagstad's voice is like a shining diamond. Traubel's voice is like a beautiful ruby." He adds: "Traubel is one of the greatest darlings I have ever been working with. In the last 20 years I have killed at least 24 Isoldes. Helen is the most agreeable. She is the nicest of them all. Flagstad was not so easy. She got a little swollen with success. Helen will always have both feet on the ground. She will never start to fly."

Traubel's and Melchior's relationship is Falstaffian. In Die Walkuere, when Traubel is left alone on stage, Melchior sometimes prances about the wings as a Rhine maiden in a grass skirt, to try to make her laugh. Once, when she leaned tenderly over his body on the couch in the last act of Tristan, in the scene where Tristan dies of wounds inflicted by a jealous rival, Melchior muttered: "Helena, hurry up the Liebestod (love death). I'm hungry and I need a beer."

Traubel likes to sing with Melchior because his size dwarfs hers. To dress her own vast proportions as handsomely as possible, Traubel has all her clothes--including her stage costumes--designed by Hollywood's Adrian. In the sewing room of Adrian's chic pastel salon, there is a headless and barrel-chested, size 46, grey muslin model standing majestically between those of Claudette Colbert, size 32, and Norma Shearer, size 32. Adrian's loose-leaf notebook lists the Traubel specifications after those for "Temple, Shirley." They tell a sizable story: "Bust, 51 inches [Shirley's is 34"]; waist, 45 1/2 inches; upper hips, 47 inches; lower hips, 46 inches." The Isolde costumes required from 18 to 25 yards, cost $10,000.

Traubel's personal wardrobe consists of mannishly tailored suits and simple dresses which make no attempt to hide her broad shoulders. Says Adrian: "We attract as little attention as possible to her bust. Her great bulk is disguised by making lines run up and down."

Rhine Wine, Bock Beer. In summer Helen Traubel and her husband rent the upstairs of a two-family house at Laguna Beach, Calif., where their neighbors are Bette Davis and Victor Mature. Traubel cooks and cleans house, swims, fishes for barracuda and halibut. Says she: "If you can't bait your own hook and clean your own fish, you ain't got no business fishing." In winter they rent a broad-windowed apartment overlooking Central Park in the tower of Manhattan's Essex House. Traubel gets up at 8, practices at the Met or with her coach until noon. In the afternoon she works on recital programs with her accompanist. An hour before she goes to the Met she eats, sometimes a steak sandwich, sometimes just breakfast food ("I find I can sing just as well without a steak as with it.") She likes boogie-woogie, but stays away from crowded 52nd Street gin mills because she is afraid of catching cold. She also stopped going to professional football, games a few years ago because they always came at the "sore-throat time" of the year. But she still follows the St. Louis Cardinals avidly; get her started, and she will leap to her feet and demonstrate Pitcher Howie Pollet's style. "He unfolds right there in front of you," she grunts, winding up `a la Pollet. This year the World Champion Cardinals made her their honorary mascot.

On her St. Louis visits Traubel usually goes to a ball game, shakes hands with the chimpanzees and orangutans in the Forest Park zoo and visits St. Matthew's Cemetery where her parents are buried. Then she gathers her South Side cousins in the Park Plaza Hotel to feast on pheasant and sauerkraut. Over glasses of Rhine wine and bock beer they talk about the old days at Grossmama's. No one seems impressed by the fact that Cousin Helen earns more than $200,000 a year singing Wagner for opera, concerts and records--least of all Cousin Helen, who is never sure exactly how much she does earn (she gets the top Met pay: $1,000 a night).

She loves Wagner's music, but finds his language deplorable. Says she: "Where we would say 'I pick this up,' Wagner says, 'Up I pick this.' If there were a harder way of saying it, he'd use that." Most operagoers find Wagner's plots grandiose and boring, but not Helen Traubel. Says she: "I like fairy tales--I still read them to rest my mind--so I can easily accept the stories."

An old St. Louis friend of hers who recently heard Traubel sing Isolde in Chicago, remarked: "Believe me, she was a wild Irish princess. I said to myself, 'My God, only an organ does that, and only on Sundays.' She still thinks the World is a beautiful place and everybody in it is good and honest. She still believes in Prince Charming, and she's the princess with golden hair."

* Mme. Flagstad's husband died in an Oslo hospital last June while awaiting trial for wartime quisling activities.

*Robert Malone, now a Manhattan singing teacher.

*A German-born prima donna who sparkled on & off in the Met's Wagnerian tiara from 1895 to 1917. Damrosch was also responsible for bringing to the U.S. such other Wagnerian greats as Lilli Lehmann and Milka Ternina.

/- Traubel's first husband, Louis F. Carpenter, was a St. Louis auto salesman, whom she married when she was 19.

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