Liebestod

It was like the Liebestod that had killed Isolde on a hundred nights at the opera. The great Wagnerian voice had risen, had touched all the heroic notes, had softened, had faded, had died. For 20 years she was the world's greatest soprano and for nearly 40 it was hard to imagine Wagner without her. Then, last week, at 67, after a bedridden year, Kirsten Flagstad died.

From her debut at Oslo's National Theater in 1913 to her farewell on the same stage 40 years to the day later, she was unquestionably the diva of the century. Her voice was at first sweet and small, but by 1935, when she made her debut at the Met as Sieglinde in Die Walkuere, it had grown into immense power and clarity, perfectly even throughout its great range. She had grown with it, and when, as Isolde, she embraced Lauritz Melchior's Tristan, 400 pounds of lovebird sang from the stage. But together they were 400 pounds of genius, too, and after them Wagner could never again be the same.

She had no mind for anything but opera, and before Hitler took Poland she gushed to the press about his beautiful blue eyes. In 1941 she got a Nazi visa to return to occupied Norway, where she lived well on the profits of her husband's collaborationist lumber business. He died on the eve of his trial during the purge of the quislings in 1946. When Flagstad returned to the U.S., she was greeted with pickets, jeers and stink bombs in the concert halls of three cities. But she was innocent, if naive, and the world soon forgave her. And after her long silence, she seemed better than before.

She retired time and again, but like Bruennhilde emerging from the fire, she kept making reappearances--a six-week charity tour of 25 concerts, an astonishing, exhausting month-long recording session in which she filled twelve albums with a full Wagnerian repertory. At 60, the heroic soprano range was still hers--not the top C, perhaps, but certainly the top A, clear, strong, unfailing.

In her last years she took up the direction of the new Norway Opera and retired happily to her great wood house in Kristiansand, on Norway's south coast. There, amid heavy paintings and great music, she knitted, played solitaire, entertained her friends with evenings of Schumann and Schubert, softly singing the lieder to her own accompaniment. And always, there was the suggestion that given some encouragement, she could still sing the great Liebestod, the song of love-unto-death that belonged to Flagstad.

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