A "Coming Back" for Birgit

By Christopher Porterfield

After four years, a great Wagnerian soprano soars again

The dollar is down. The mails have grown erratic. Muhammad Ali can no longer whup all comers. But the news from the Metropolitan Opera is that the voice of Sweden's Birgit Nilsson, 61, is remarkably intact. Some things in this world can still be counted on.

Nilsson, the world's reigning Wagnerian soprano, had not been heard in the U.S. since 1975. At that time the Internal Revenue Service presented her with a bouquet of claims for back taxes totaling a reported $500,000. While contesting the claims, Nilsson performed only in other countries, leaving behind her lawyers and her legend. This year a settlement was arrived at, under which she will pay the Government a percentage of her U.S. income each year. Last week, at a gala benefit concert with Music Director James Levine and the Met orchestra (ticket prices: $25 to $200), a near capacity audience assembled to hear how much of her brilliance she retained at an age when most singers have retired.

Without waiting for the answer, they greeted her entrance with a standing, cheering ovation that forced her to fight back tears before beginning. Perhaps as a result, her opening Dich, teure Halle from Wagner's Tannhaeuser was slightly strained. But in Bruennhilde's immolation scene from Goetterdaemmerung, her characteristic sound -- laser-focused, with a metallic edge and a peculiar "white" timbre in the upper reaches -- rang out with soaring power. What she lost through occasionally deliberate phrasing and careful approaches to top notes, she made up in dramatic shading and rapt emotion. After she poured out the final scene of Strauss's Salome, then tossed off an exuberant encore of Brunnhilde's Ho-yo-to-ho! from Die Walkure, the response rose beyond shouts of "Brava!" to a sustained, cathartic roar, almost elemental in its ferocity.

"They were even louder than the South Americans," said a relieved Nilsson the following day, relaxing in an apartment borrowed from Tenor Placido Domingo. "Memories often turn sweeter over the years. I was nervous that for the public my coming back might be a letting down." Between congratulatory phone calls and visitors, she was preparing for further comings back: a recital in Pasadena, Calif., concerts in San Francisco and Seattle. In February she will be back at the Met in Strauss's Elektra.

When asked whether she still performs all her old roles, especially the grueling Brunnhildes in the Ring cycle, Nilsson looked as if she had been asked whether she still puts on her own shoes. Said she: "The only one I haven't done lately is Isolde, but that's mostly because there are no tenors around to sing Tristan." She did not know the secret of her durability, nor did she seem to want to know. "Nature," she shrugged. She would have no truck with regimens for preserving her voice: "Between performances I forget I'm a singer. Some singers can't do that. Always they are going hmmm-hmmm with their voice -- they drive me crazy."

Not only did she not cut her repertory during her years away from the U.S., she has added a new role: the Dyer's Wife in Strauss's Die Frau Ohne Schatten ("At last, a simple human being with every day problems, after always being a god dess or running around with somebody's cut-off head"). She will sing it for the first time in the U.S. next fall, with the San Francisco Opera. After that? Her one concession to the advancing years is that she is reluctant to make commitments very far ahead. "When managers ask me, I say I'd like to do such and such, provided I still have a voice," she says.

"After all, I don't want to go on forever."

Considering the way she is going on now, that may come as a surprise in some quarters.

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